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Quotes by Austrian Authors
"Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love."
"Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world."
"The core of the doctrine consists in the proposition that the supply of money and the demand for it both affect its value. This proposition is probably a sufficiently good hypothesis to explain big changes in prices; but it is far from containing a complete theory of the value of money. It describes one cause of changes in prices; it is nevertheless inadequate for dealing with the problem exhaustively. By itself it does not comprise a theory of the value of money; it needs the basis of a general value theory. One after another, the doctrine of supply and demand, the cost-of-production theory, and the subjective theory of value have had to provide the foundations for the Quantity Theory."
"Other inflationists realize very well that an increase in the quantity of money reduces the purchasing power of the monetary unit. But they endeavour to secure inflation none-the-less, because of its effect on the value of money; they want depreciation, because they want to favour debtors at the expense of creditors and because they want to encourage exportation and make importation difficult."
"In this way the ego detaches itself from the external world. It is more correct to say: Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling - a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world."
"Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can't control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it."
"If you already have a person's love no sacrifice can be too much to give for it, but any sacrifice is too great to buy it for you."
"Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it."
"Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us."
"Life as we find it is too hard for us it entails too much pain too many disappointments impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies."
"I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe."
"Association with human beings lures one into self-observation."
"The phenomenon of money presupposes an economic order in which production is based on division of labour and in which private property consists not only in goods of the first order (consumption goods), but also in goods of higher orders (production goods). In such a society, there is no systematic centralized control of production, for this is inconceivable without centralized disposal over the means of production."
"He who cares to go to the trouble of demonstrating the uselessness of index numbers for monetary theory and the concrete tasks of monetary policy will be able to select a good proportion of his weapons from the writings of the very men who invented them."
"We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love."
"Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before."
"We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all."
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society."
"All of nature begins to whisper its secrets to us through its sounds. Sounds that were previously incomprehensible to our soul now become the meaningful language of nature."
"Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be."
"Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another."
"The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened."
"Perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction."
"Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways."
"War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings."
"The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler."
"Christianity is not a doctrine, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event an so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it."
"The valuations which result in determination of definite prices are different. Each party attaches a higher value to the good he receives than to that he gives away. The exchange ratio, the price, is not the product of equality of valuation, but on the contrary, the product of a discrepancy in valuation."
"The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite."
"All varieties of the producers' policy are advocated on the ground of their alleged ability to raise the party members' standard of living. Protectionism and economic self-sufficiency, labor union pressure and compulsion, labor legislation, minimum wage rates, public spending, credit expansion, subsidies, and other makeshifts are always recommended by their advocates as the most suitable or the only means to increase the real income of the people for whose votes they canvass. Every contemporary statesman or politician invariably tells his voters: My program will make you as affluent as conditions may permit, while my adversaries' program will bring you want and misery."
"This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me."
"It must be pointed out that the level of the total stock of money and of the value of the money unit are matters of complete indifference as far as the utility obtained from the use of the money is concerned. Society is always in enjoyment of the maximum utility obtainable from the use of money. Half of the money at the disposal of the community would yield the same utility as the whole stock, even if the variation in the value of the monetary unit was not proportioned to the variation in the stock of money."
"Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery."
"This was the argument put forward during the War when the expenditure on the army and navy had to be met; and this was the argument put forward in Germany and Austria after the War when a part of the population had to be provided with cheap food, the losses on the operation of the railways and other public undertakings met, and reparations payments made. The assistance of inflation is invoked whenever a government is unwilling to increase taxation or unable to raise a loan; that is the truth of the matter."
"No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere."
"If youth knew if age could."
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