“Planning other people’s actions means to prevent them from planning for themselves, means to deprive them of their essentially human quality, means enslaving them.”

The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by governments.

The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions.

The only source from which an entrepreneurs profits stem is his ability to anticipate better than other people the future demand of the consumers.

They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent.

The riches of successful entrepreneurs is not the cause of anybody’s poverty; it is the consequence of the fact that the consumers are better supplied than they would have been in the absence of the entrepreneur’s efforts.

German Marxian’s coined the dictum: If socialism is against human nature, then human nature must be changed.

In such vital matters blind reliance upon ‘experts’ and uncritical acceptance of popular catchwords and prejudices is tantamount to the abandonment of self-determination and to yielding to other people’s domination.

Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen.

Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy.

The whole grim apparatus of oppression and coercion, policemen, customs guards, penal courts, prisons, in some countries even executioners, had to be put into action in order to destroy the gold standard.

The struggle for freedom is not the struggle of the many against the few, but of minorities, sometimes of a minority of but one man gainst the majority.

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement.

Every government intervention [in the marketplace] creates unintended consequences, which lead to calls for further government interventions.

Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.

The most important thing to remember is that inflation is not an act of God, that inflation is not a catastrophe of the elements or a disease that comes like the plague. Inflation is a policy.

The life before ’68 was very different from the life after ’68. Before ’68, our days were full of authoritarian moments. There were authorities everywhere. In fact, the movement of ’68 was young people against their authorities, children against their parents. And that remained.

Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will.

How could I stand the separation from family and friends? It is ironic, I say, that in an authoritarian state it is only the prisoner of conscience who is genuinely free. Yes, we have given up our right to a normal life. But we have stayed true to that most precious part of our humanity-our conscience.

A part of society in our countries would still prefer an authoritarian regime today. These are people with the mentality of Homo sovieticus. But they also exist in France – just think of Le Pen – and even in Finland and Sweden.