Academics From The United States

"The enforcement of price controls requires a government similar to that of Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia, in which practically anyone might turn out to be a police spy and in which a secret police exists and has the power to arrest and imprison people."

"The requirements of enforcing a system of price and wage controls shed major light on the totalitarian nature of socialism — most obviously, of course, on that of the German or Nazi variant of socialism, but also on that of Soviet-style socialism as well."

"The combination of price controls with this further set of controls constitutes the de facto socialization of the economic system. For it means that the government then exercises all of the substantive powers of ownership."

"What specifically established de facto socialism in Nazi Germany was the introduction of price and wage controls in 1936."

"If the individual [in Nazi Germany] is a means to the ends of the State, so too, of course, is his property. Just as he is owned by the State, his property is also owned by the State."

"Private ownership of the means of production existed in name only under the Nazis and that the actual substance of ownership of the means of production resided in the German government. For it was the German government and not the nominal private owners that exercised all of the substantive powers of ownership: it, not the nominal private owners, decided what was to be produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to be distributed, as well as what prices would be charged and what wages would be paid, and what dividends or other income the nominal private owners would be permitted to receive."

"When one remembers that the word "Nazi" was an abbreviation for "der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiters Partei" — in English translation: the National Socialist German Workers' Party — Mises's identification might not appear all that noteworthy. For what should one expect the economic system of a country ruled by a party with "socialist" in its name to be but socialism?"

"The identification of Nazi Germany as a socialist state was one of the many great contributions of Ludwig von Mises."

"Under communism (socialism), there is no incentive to supply people with anything they need or want, including safety."

"The slaves of socialism are slaves, but they are no one's property and therefore no one's loss."

"The truth is that economic competition is the very opposite of competition in the animal kingdom. It is not a competition in the grabbing off of scarce nature-given supplies, as it is in the animal kingdom. Rather, it is a competition in the positive creation of new and additional wealth."

"Whoever claims that economic competition represents "survival of the fittest" in the sense of the law of the jungle, provides the clearest possible evidence of his lack of knowledge of economics."

"Like the use of the word 'concupiscence' in an earlier age to describe sexual desire, the use of the word 'pollution' to describe essential aspects of the productive activities of an industrial society represents an attempt to defame an entirely proper human capacity by means of using an evil sounding name for it."

"The green movement, in other words, is the red movement stripped of the veneer of reason and science and bent on the destruction of reason and science rather than take the trouble to learn what reason and science actually are. The green movement is the red movement no longer in its boisterous, arrogant youth, but in its demented old age."

"Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy will be redeemed when the people have taken back their government from the criminal alliance of Communists, Socialists, New Dealers and the Eisenhower-Dewey Republicans."

"I have read it with the deepest appreciation of Mr. Herron's singular insight into all the elements of a complicated situation and into my own motives and purposes."

"I can imagine no greater disservice to the country than to establish a system of censorship that would deny to the people of a free republic like our own their indisputable right to criticise their own public officials. While exercising the great powers of the office I hold, I would regret in a crisis like the one through which we are now passing to lose the benefit of patriotic and intelligent criticism."

"The supreme test of the nation has come. We must all speak, act, and serve together!"

"Once lead this people into war and they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance."

"A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible."

"It must be a peace without victory... Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last."

"The question upon which the whole future peace and policy of the world depends is this: Is the present war a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power? If it be only a struggle for a new balance of power, who will guarantee, who can guarantee, the stable equilibrium of the new arrangement? Only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace."

"I am inclined to follow the course suggested by a friend of mine who says that he has always followed the rule never to murder a man who is committing suicide, and clearly this misdirected gentleman is committing suicide slowly but surely."

"Loyalty means nothing unless it has at its heart the absolute principle of self-sacrifice."

"If you want to make enemies, try to change something."

"I have long enjoyed the friendship and companionship of Republicans, because I am by instinct a teacher and I would like to teach them something."

"The only excuse that America can ever have for the assertion of her physical force is that she asserts it in behalf of the interests of humanity."

"There is a price which is too great to pay for peace, and that price can be put in one word. One cannot pay the price of self-respect."

"America cannot be an ostrich with its head in the sand."

"Some men who are not real men love other things about themselves, but the real man believes that his honor is dearer than his life; and a nation is merely all of us put together, and the nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort and the nation's peace and the nation's life itself."

"One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat."

"We want the spirit of America to be efficient; we want American character to be efficient; we want American character to display itself in what I may, perhaps, be allowed to call spiritual efficiency—clear, disinterested thinking and fearless action along the right lines of thought. America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us; and it can consist of all of us only as our spirits are banded together in a common enterprise."

"Do you never stop to reflect just what it is that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another, it is for the sovereignty of self-governing peoples, and her example, her assistance, her encouragement, has thrilled two continents in this Western World with all the fine impulses which have built up human liberty on both sides of the water."

"Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself."

"We have stood apart, studiously neutral."

"There is a very great thrill to be had from the memories of the American Revolution, but the American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation, and the duty laid upon us by that beginning is the duty of bringing the things then begun to a noble triumph of completion."

"The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history. It represents the experiences made by men and women, the experiences of those who do and live under that flag."

"We are constantly thinking of the great war … which which we think to-day as a war which saved the Union, and it did indeed save the Union, but it was a war that did a great deal more than that. It created in this country what had never existed before — a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union, it was the rebirth of the Union."

"There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right."

"No man that does not see visions will ever realize any high hope or undertake any high enterprise."

"There is such thing as a man being too proud to fight."

"No nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation."

"You deal in the raw material of opinion, and, if my convictions have any validity, opinion ultimately governs the world."

"Segregation is not humiliating but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen. If your organization goes out and tells the colored people of the country that it is a humiliation, they will so regard it, but if you do not tell them so, and regard it rather as a benefit, they will regard it the same. The only harm that will come will be if you cause them to think it is a humiliation... If this organization is ever to have another hearing before me it must have another spokesman. Your manner offends me..."

"The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name...We must be impartial in thought as well as in action."

"There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means or another that I am President of the United States."

"I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow, and I have borrowed a lot since I read it to you first."

"The way to stop financial joy-riding is to arrest the chauffeur, not the automobile."

"I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men."

"I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty."