Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.

All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.

The Marxians love of democratic institutions was a stratagem only, a pious fraud for the deception of the masses. Within a socialist community there is no room left for freedom.

Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.

If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization

He who only wishes and hopes does not interfere actively with the course of events and with the shaping of his own destiny.

The masses do not like those who surpass them in any regard. The average man envies and hates those who are different.

He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.

The alcoholic and the drug addict harm only themselves by their behavior; the person who violates the rules of morality governing mans life in society harms not only himself, but everyone.

All people, however fanatical they may be in their zeal to disparage and to fight capitalism, implicitly pay homage to it by passionately clamoring for the products it turns out

Nobody ever recommended a dictatorship aiming at ends other than those he himself approved. He who advocates dictatorship always advocates the unrestricted rule of his own will

Repression by brute force is always a confession of the inability to make use of the better weapons of the intellect—better because they alone give promise of final success.

The average man is both better informed and less corruptible in the decisions he makes as a consumer than as a voter at political elections.

A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society.

The market system is the basis of our civilization. Its only alternative is the F�hrer principle.

Against what is stupid, nonsensical, erroneous, and evil, [classical] liberalism fights with the weapons of the mind, and not with brute force and repression.

Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.

The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.

The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.

Every step which leads from capitalism toward planning is necessarily a step nearer to absolutism and dictatorship.

It is labor alone that is productive: it creates wealth and therewith lays the outward foundations for the inward flowering of man.

Every type of socialism is unworkable because economic calculation is impossible in a socialist community.

Romanticism is man's revolt against reason, as well as against the condition under which nature has compelled him to live.

In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.

The elimination of profit, whatever methods may be resorted to for its execution, must transform society into a senseless jumble.

If any of the socialist chiefs had tried to earn his living by selling hot dogs, he would have learned something about the sovereignty of the consumers.

In a capitalist society one can hold on to one’s fortune only if one perpetually acquires it anew by investing it wisely.

If one rejects laissez faire on account of mans fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.

Anticapitalism can maintain itself in existence only by sponging on capitalism.

Socialism is an alternative to capitalism as potassium cyanide is an alternative to water.

Every socialist is a disguised dictator.

Human action is purposeful behavior.

Credit expansion can bring about a temporary boom. But such a fictitious prosperity must end in a general depression of trade, a slump.

The exchange-value of money is the anticipated use-value of the things that can be obtained with it.

Production is “anarchistic.

The central element in the economic problem of money is the objective exchange-value of money, popularly called its purchasing power.

The individual is today no longer primarily a citizen, but a party member.

What is called “orthodox” economics is in most countries barred from the universities and is virtually unknown to the leading statesmen, politicians, and writers.

Religious wars are the most terrible wars because they are waged without any prospect of conciliation.

Thinking is always thinking of a potential action.

It is common with narrow-minded people to reflect upon every respect in which other people differ from themselves.

Economics is a living thing—and to live implies both imperfection and change.

More dangerous than bayonets and cannon are the weapons of the mind.

It is not the poverty of individuals and the community, not indebtedness to foreign nations, not the unfavourableness of the conditions of production, that force up the rate of exchange, but inflation.

One must rather ask how much could be produced if competition among producers were abolished.

The agents of etatism have certainly not been lacking in zeal and energy. But, for all this, economic affairs cannot be kept going by magistrates and policemen.

The attempt to restrain prices within limits has to be given up. A government that sets out to abolish market prices is inevitably driven towards the abolition of private property.

Only very few men have the gift of thinking new and original ideas and of changing the traditional body of creeds and doctrines.

The function of money is to facilitate the business of the market by acting as a common medium of exchange.