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Quotes by Austrian Authors
"Local differences in the prices of commodities whose natures are technologically identical are to be explained on the one hand by differences in the cost of preparing them for consumption (expenses of transport, cost of retailing etc.) and on the other hand by the physical and legal obstacles that restrict the mobility of commodities and human beings."
"If we disregard the exchange of present goods for future goods, and restrict our considerations for the time being to those cases in which the only exchanges are those between present goods and present money, we shall at once observe a fundamental difference between the effects of an isolated variation in a single commodity-price, emanating solely from the commodity side, and the effects of a variation in the exchange-ratio between money and other economic goods in general, emanating from the monetary side."
"I am as I am, and that's all there is to it, I can hardly take a pair of scissors to myself, and cut out a different person..."
"The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support."
"'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded."
"The negative side to globalization is that it wipes out entire economic systems and in doing so wipes out the accompanying culture."
"He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore."
"The site of hearing was now known to be in the cochlea."
"The first value of money was clearly the value which the goods used as money possessed (thanks to their suitability for satisfying human wants in other ways) at the moment when they were first used as common media of exchange."
"After the advent of the written word, the masses who could not - or were not permitted to - read, were given sermons by the few who could."
"I was a crazy young man who let himself be blinded by his passions and obeyed only the impulses of the moment."
"Melodic invention is one of the surest signs of a divine gift."
"Never let oneself be guided by the opinion of one's contemporaries. Continue steadfastly on one's way."
"It is easier to achieve a desired result in short pieces."
"In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality."
"Lawyers know how to take isolated complaints in a divorce case and build them into one big one."
"All my six husbands married me for different reasons."
"I knew I was a winner back in the late sixties. I knew I was destined for great things. People will say that kind of thinking is totally immodest. I agree. Modesty is not a word that applies to me in any way - I hope it never will."
"It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise."
"I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador - an adventurer, if you want it translated - with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort."
"But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?"
"It does not do to use it with forms whose origin is intimately bound up with a specific material simply because no technical difficulties stand in the way."
"The actor depends wholly on himself. He gives his performance in what, to him, seems the most effective manner."
"Philosophy is not a theory but an activity."
"In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate."
"You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion."
"If our dreams were more regular, more connected, more stable, they would also have more practical importance for us."
"I long for you; I who usually longs without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you."
"I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can't even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk."
"Nevertheless statesmen are still greatly exercised by the problem of the international distribution of money. For hundreds of years, the Midas Theory, systematized by Mercantilism, has been the rule followed by governments in taking measures of commercial policy. In spite of Hume, Smith, and Ricardo, it still dominates men's minds more than would be expected. Phoenix-like, it rises again and again from its own ashes."
"I received my doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1910."
"Fear may come true that which one is afraid of."
"I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way."
"It will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality above idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their direction, and he awakens them."
"I was fortunate to find an extraordinary mathematics and applied mathematics program in Toronto."
"In the fight between you and the world, back the world."
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