Ludwig von Mises Quotes

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings. The earthquake means good business for construction workers, and cholera improves the business of physicians, pharmacists, and undertakers; but no one has for that reason yet sought to celebrate earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in the general interest.

It was the height of the Depression, and suddenly I am earning pots of money.

During the last war when there was a market for everything that could be produced, the production capacity of Canada and the United States, which were outside the battle area, increased one hundred percent.

Our science has become terrible, our research dangerous, our findings deadly. We physicists have to make peace with reality. Reality is not as strong as we are. We will ruin reality.

Anybody can be very destructive in that position without at all meaning to be, and I know that I have been inadvertently destructive in the past for certain people on certain occasions.

When the political and military levels … want to initiate operational war they want to gain as much public support as possible. So whether they do it deliberately or not, they tend to promise that it will be much better than the way that it really could be. Now when the reality comes true and suddenly the results … are different from the expectations and the promises, then the frustration comes to be a very important factor.

...all wars eventually act as boomerangs and the victor suffers as much as the vanquished

When bulls fight, woe to the frogs.

Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before ... In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.

Unintended Consequences

Wizard's Second Rule The greatest harm can result from the best intentions.

It's hard to hear that your good intentions are making things worse and tragic.

I never saw no miracle of science that did not go from a blessing to a curse.

God save us from people who mean well.

That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.

People make decisions that may have one intent and yet are somehow perverted into something else. And sometimes it's because of design. Sometimes it's because of happenstance. But very often, it's mysterious to them.

We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.

What selfish seeds I plant along the way, black harvest today.

It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the connection between cause and effect seems so improbable. By turning on the lights, filling the kettle, taking the children to school, driving to the shops, we are condemning other people to death. We never chose to do this. We do not see ourselves as killers. We perform these acts without passion or intent.

What is forgotten, however, is that many times the Good we create leads to Evil that will destroy us.

Sometimes our best action result in things that are most regrettable.

Somehow, the fact that more poor people are on welfare, receiving more generous payments, does not seem to have made this country a nice place to live - not even for the poor on welfare, whose condition seems not noticeably better than when they were poor and off welfare. Something appears to have gone wrong; a liberal and compassionate social policy has bred all sorts of unanticipated and perverse consequences.

[Black Mirror] is always about unforeseen consequences and unforeseen problems, it's not usually that someone's created a machine that they want to enslave mankind with, it's someone's invented a new kind of... paperweight that enslaves mankind.

Every choice that we makes creates consequences, consequences in the lives of others and we experience them in ourselves, those same consequences, every choice that we make. And by the way the choices that you might think are the most important are not always the most important.