Ludwig von Mises Quotes

Historical capitalism is a materialist civilization.

There's a sense in which Marx does contribute to the fund of human knowledge, and we can no more dismiss him than we can [George] Hegel or [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau or [Baruch] Spinoza or [Charles] Darwin; you don't have to be a Darwinian to appreciate Darwin's views, and I don't have to be a Marxist to appreciate what is valid in a number of [Karl] Marx's writings-and Marx would call that a form of simple commodity production rather than capitalism.

I'm signing on to be an athlete, and it's almost like Karl Marx's theory on capitalism. I am both the worker and the product. I'm choosing to be a part of this system, thus I'm choosing to be part of the conditions that are set in this system.

If people don't like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.

Traditional Marxism attempted to argue against free enterprise by saying that capitalism causes poverty and that, therefore, socialism is necessary. That didn't work, because it was false.

I am still moved by passages of Marx: the 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,' for example, where, after the famous line about religion being 'the opium of the people,' he goes on to call it 'the heart of a heartless world.'

We modern Marxists regard socialism as a historically brief transitional stage between feudalism and capitalism, necessary only in backward countries.

Something that's seldom appreciated about me is that I am in sympathy with a great deal of what Marx wrote, except that I'm on the side of the bourgeoisie.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

Even though the society that Marx foresaw is far from being an historical reality, Marxism has penetrated so deeply in history that we are all Marxists, one way or another, even unknowingly.

Well, Marx is having a comeback. I hear him mentioned a lot in terms of the global financial situation and the general sense of injustice out there. A lot of economic experts in America refer to him without actually using the M word, but he's around.

It is therefore utterly false to say that Marx revokes the law of value as far as individual commodities are concerned, and maintains it in force solely for the aggregate of these commodities.

There are a few people, but a diminishing number, who still believe that Marxism, as an economic system, off era a coherent alternative to capitalism, and socialism has, indeed, triumphed in one country.

Marx was fortunate to have been born eighty years before Walt Disney. Disney also promised a child's paradise and unlike Marx, delivered on his promise.

Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.

For [Karl] Marx, science was a creative, historic and revolutionary force.

Marx never saw an electric light bulb.

Marx is the prophet of globalized capitalism.

As for Marx, his economic value, apart from occasional … flashes of insight, is nil.

Stealing from capitalism is not like stealing out of our own pockets. Marx and Lenin have taught us that anything is ethical, so long as it is in the interest of the proletarian class and its world revolution.

I actually did trouble to read Marx first hand. I found it illuminating in so many ways; in particular, my perception of the relationship between people and the society in which they live was irreversibly altered.

Traditionally Marxism attracts the oppressed. This, however, is not the case in the Arab nation... The socialist programs in Arab history did not always come from the poor, but from men who had known no oppression and became the leaders of the poor. The Arab nation has never been as class-conscious as other nations.

As far as Marx's analysis of capitalism, there's a lot of very useful ideas in it, but he's developing an abstract model of 19th century capitalism. It's abstract and it's changed.

As far as social-economic theory is concerned, I am still a Marxist

For one who has read the works of Marx it is frightening to look back at the grim determination with which so many nations steadfastly hewed to the very course which he insisted would lead to their undoing.