Austrian Quotes & Sayings

Founded in 1336 AD, Vijayanagara would soon grow to be one of the world's mightiest empires. At its peak, the Vijayanagara Empire covered a size that was larger than the Austrian empire. It was one of the richest empires of its time, which made foreign visitors wonder in awe, be it the architecture, the urban layouts or its immense wealth in diamonds and riches. — Ratnakar Sadasyula

Hayek was never a popular author to the extent that everyone was reading him at the corner newsstand. But the Austrian refugee showed how the roots of Hitler's tyranny and the bases of Marxist collectivism were one and the same. His work had a profound influence on a generation of freedom loving young conservatives. Even — William J. Bennett

One of the middle ones in the flock, I was born on July 24, 1857, in the small Jutland town of Fredericia. In 1863, my father was transferred to Randers, another Jutland town, where a year later, at the age of six, I experienced the invasion of the allied Prussian and Austrian armies. — Henrik Pontoppidan

World War III will be triggered off not by suppressed nationalists seeking political independence, as happened the first time around when the Serbs at Sarajevo shot the heir to the Austrian throne, but by some semiliterate, whacked-out "loner" who lobs a rocket into a nuclear arsenal in order to impress Brooke Shields. — Philip Roth

Each of us, even the lowliest and most insignificant among us, was uprooted from his innermost existence by the almost constant volcanic upheavals visited upon our European soil and, as one of countless human beings, I can't claim any special place for myself except that, as an Austrian, a Jew, writer, humanist and pacifist, I have always been precisely in those places where the effects of the thrusts were most violent. — Stefan Zweig

As 'Austrian' business cycle theory has pointed out, any bank credit inflation sets up conditions for boom-and-bust; there is no need for prices actually to rise. — Murray Rothbard

Can social progress be made without government?
It's like saying 'can happiness be achieved without the initiation of violence? Can romance be achieved without rape? Can profitability be achieved without theft? Can economic growth be achieved without the mass indebted enslavement and counterfeiting of the federal reserve?'. — Stefan Molyneux

The name Shatner is Austrian and partly Germanic, and there's Germanic reticence and silence perhaps, but there is passion underneath. — William Shatner

It's great to be with you gun-toting, 10ther, pro-life, Austrian-economics, home-schooling, redoubt-living, Constitutionalist patriots this evening. I think that covers the SPLC's list. — Matt Shea

Nick stands up and offers his hand to me. I have no idea what he wants, but what the hell, I take his hand anyway, and he pulls me up on my feet then presses against me for a slow dance and it's like we're in a dream where he's Christopher Plummer and I'm Julie Andrews and we're dancing on the marble floor of an Austrian terrace garden. Somehow my head presses Nick's t-shirt and in this moment I am forgetting about time and Tal because maybe my life isn't over. Maybe it's only beginning. — Rachel Cohn

I can't just go up to people standing in the snow at the German-Austrian border and ask them: "Are you an Islamist?" When people flee to us from war zones, we first have to help. But we also have to be quick to look very closely at who it is that is coming. — Alice Schwarzer

When I was a child, all I wanted was to enter the Austrian team and to compete on the World Cup tour. I had to fight hard to reach this. I wanted badly to win each race. — Hermann Maier

I declare myself an Austrian and a European. A united Europe will be a peaceful Europe. — Heinz Fischer

The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion. — Ludwig Von Mises

Critics say Arnold has no previous government experience, but advisers say he's clearly the most qualified Austrian, ex-Mr. Universe in the race. — Craig Kilborn

The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. — Frederic Bastiat

If I would have listened to the naysayers, I would still be in the Austrian Alps yodeling. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

Many thinkers have tried to "naturalize" consumerism in that way, including most social Darwinists, Austrian School economists (Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard), Chicago School economists (George Stigler, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker), Darwinian libertarians, globalization advocates, management gurus, and marketers. Their model (which I call the Wrong Conservative Model, because I think it's wrong, and because it's usually advocated by political conservatives) is: human nature + free markets = consumerist capitalism — Geoffrey Miller

I was born on July 23rd, 1906, in Sarajevo in the province of Bosnia, which then belonged to the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy and later, in 1918, became part of Yugoslavia. — Vladimir Prelog

Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors. "So that's what war looks like!" von Trapp wrote in a later memoir. He told his chief officer, "We are like highway men, sneaking up on an unsuspecting ship in such a cowardly fashion." Fighting in a trench or aboard a torpedo boat would have been better, he said. "There you hear shooting, hear your comrades fall, you hear the wounded groaning - you become filled with rage and can shoot men in self defense or fear; at an assault you can even yell! But we! Simply cold-blooded to drown a mass of men in an ambush! — Erik Larson

In his thoughtful and complex style of analysis, Hitler continued on to note the following: "Since the newspapers in question did not enjoy an outstanding reputation ... I regarded them more as the products of anger and envy than the [representation] of a principled, though perhaps mistaken, point of view." In the lines above, we see Hitler begin to wrestle with anti- Semitism, flatly reject religious anti-Semitism as unworthy of Austrian cultural tradition, and suspect that the arguments of the anti-Semitic press and gutter pamphlets were exaggerated beyond credibility by too much subjective and too little objective and principled argument. The view of virtually every Hitler biographer that he based his anti-Semitism on arguments derived from the gutter press and pamphlets of Vienna does not hold up in the face of the words above. To the contrary, we see Hitler take the measure of that literature.

--Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, pp. 103-104 — Russel H.S. Stolfi

In 1914, Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian imperial heir, was shot and killed by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo. Do you know the motive behind the act?
It was in retaliation for the subjugation of the Sebs in Austria.
It was not.Franz Ferdinand had stated his intention to introduce reforms favorable to the Serbs in his empire. Had he survived to ascend the throne, he would have made a revolution unnecessary. In plain terms, he was killed because he was going to give the rebels what they were shouting for. They needed a despot in the palace in order to seize it.
What's good for reform is bad for the reformers — Loren D. Estleman

Some economists became obsessed with market efficiency and others with market failure. Generally held to be members of opposite schools-freshwater and saltwater, Chicago and Cambridge, liberal and conservative, Austrian and Keynesian-both sides share an essential economic vision. They see their discipline as successful insofar as it eliminates surprise-insofar, that is, as the inexorable workings of the machine override the initiatives of the human actors. — George Gilder

To try to cure unemployment by inflation rather than by adjustment of specific wage-rates is like trying to adjust the piano to the stool rather than the stool to the piano. — Henry Hazlitt

In October 1941, Mahilue became teh first substantial city in occupied Soviet Belarus where almost all Jews were killed. A German (Austrian) policeman wrote to his wife of his feelings and experiences shooting the city's Jews in the first days of the month. 'During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water.'
pp. 205-206 — Timothy Snyder

I was born in 1923 into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, a few years after the end of World War I, which was disastrous from the Austrian point of view. — Walter Kohn

The home front is always underrated by Generals in the field. And yet that is where the Great War was won and lost. The Russian, Bulgarian, Austrian and German home fronts fell to pieces before their armies collapsed. — David Lloyd George

Here's something I still can't get over. Amazes and thrills me every time. I'm sitting here and want a certain book. So I search, click, and then I have the book. Every time, my heart does a little leap of joy. What a beautiful world the market is making. — Jeffrey Tucker

Although I'm Australian, I find myself much more in sympathy with the Austrian version! — David Chalmers

The assertion that it is the intention of the German Reich to coerce the Austrian State is absurd! — Adolf Hitler

I have Jewish friends. I have Middle Eastern friends. I have Spanish and Italian and British and Scottish and German friends and Austrian friends, and guess what? They all deal with homophobia. It's an earthling epidemic; it's not isolated in the black community. — Jussie Smollett

It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society. — Murray N. Rothbard

Austrian Republic established after the war gave an amnesty to 90 per cent of members of the Nazi Party in 1948, and to the SS and Gestapo by 1957. — Edmund De Waal

I do not have voice for Russian music; I cannot be cute little peasant like in operas of Glinka or Rimsky-Korsakov. I am now never in Russia; I am Austrian citizen. But definitely I am Latin! — Anna Netrebko

European government is a clear expression I still use, you need time, but step by step, as in the Austrian case, the European Commission takes a political decision and behaves like a growing government. — Romano Prodi

In regard to the so-called social contract, I have often had occasion to protest that I haven't even seen the contract, much less been asked to consent to it. A valid contract requires voluntary offer, acceptance, and consideration. I've never received an offer from my rulers, so I certainly have not accepted one; and rather than consideration, I have received nothing but contempt from the rulers, who, notwithstanding the absence of any agreement, have indubitably threatened me with grave harm in the event that I fail to comply with their edicts. — Robert Higgs

And the Austrian army, awfully arrayed, boldly, by battery, besieged Belgrade. — Patrick Leigh Fermor

Free markets are the real people's revolution. — Jeffrey Tucker

No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want. — Ludwig Von Mises

My dad's family is part British and Austrian, and my mother's family is from Goa, which is in the south of India. I looked different from everyone else, which now is such a blessing. It was harder at the beginning of my career. — Meaghan Rath

Balint pondered the programme outlined by Slawata: centralization, rule by an Imperial Council, the ancient kingdom of Hungary reduced to an Austrian province, and national boundaries to be re-arranged statistically according to the ethnic origin of the inhabitants! Why all this? To what purpose? Slawata had given him the answer: Imperial expansion in the Balkans so that feudal kingdoms for the Habsburgs reached the Sea of Marmora; and it was all to be achieved with the blood of Hungarian soldiers and paid for by Hungarian tax-money! So it was merely to help Vienna spread Austrian hegemony over the nations of the Balkans that Tisza was to be helped to build up the Hungarian national armed forces. — Miklos Banffy

Austrian public-opinion pollsters recently reported that those held in highest esteem by most of the people interviewed are neither the great artists nor the great scientists, neither the great statesmen nor the great sport figures, but those who master a hard lot with their heads held high. — Viktor E. Frankl

It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle. — Alexis De Tocqueville

If a German or an Austrian, a Greek or a Bashibazouk, had composed Gerontius, the whole world would have by now admitted its qualities. — Neville Cardus

Something new is blowing. On a downtown Kingston wall: IMF - Is Manley Fault. General election called for October 30, 1980. Somebody is driving you through Bavaria, near the Austrian border. A hospital sprouting out of the forest like magic. Hills in the background tipped with snow like cake icing. You meet the tall and frosty Bavarian, the man who helps the hopeless. He smiles but his eyes are set too far back and they vanish in the shadow of his brow. Cancer is a red alert that the whole body is in danger, he says. Thank God the food he forbids, Rastafari had forbidden long time. A sunrise is a promise. Something new is blowing. November 1980. A new party wins the general election and the man who killed me steps up to the podium with his brothers to take over the country. He has been waiting for so long he leaps up the stairs and trips. — Marlon James

Government should never be able to do anything you can't do. If you can't steal from your neighbor, you can't send the government to steal for you. — Ron Paul

and the camp swarmed with well-provisioned sutlers and Austrian Jews offering all sorts of tempting wares. The — Leo Tolstoy

Maggots in corpses. He'd seen. Whitely churning, in the mouths of dead soldiers, where their noses had been, their ears and blasted-away jaws. Most of the soldiers had been men as young as he himself had been. Italians fallen after the Austrian offensive of 1918. You do not forget such sights. You do not un-see such sights. He himself had been wounded, but he had not died. The distinction was profound. Between what lived and what died the distinction was profound. Yet it remained mysterious, elusive. You did not wish to speak of it. Especially you did not wish to pray about it, to beg God to spare you. For it disgusted him to think of God. It disgusted him to think of prayers to such a god. Fumbling his big, bare toe against the trigger of the shotgun he was damned if he would think, in his last quivering moment of his life, of God. — Joyce Carol Oates

I don't think that neutrality is an obstacle to Austria's successful integration into European and world structures ... but this is a question that the Austrian people themselves must decide — Vladimir Putin

July 4, the day we celebrate giving our political masters independence from conscience, morality, consequences for evil doing, and basic social and economic reality.
The fireworks are the glowing tears of your children's incinerated futures.
Cheer happy slaves - your only chains are your deluded joys. Cheer and sing, because for you, songs of death are easier than questions of life. — Stefan Molyneux

Chanel is composed of only a few elements, white camellias, quilted bags and Austrian doorman's jackets, pearls, chains, shoes with black toes. I use these elements like notes to play with. — Karl Lagerfeld

They wanted to know, you see. They were afraid that with our typical Austrian faces, we might be able to pass. They didn't want to be fooled. Even then, in the 1920s, they wanted to be able to tell who was a Jew. — Edith Hahn Beer

Jelena Gencic was born in October 1936 to a Serb father and Austrian mother. — Chris Bowers

There must not be lacking in our leadership something of that spirit of the Austrian corporal who, when all had fallen into ruins around him, and when Germany seemed to have fallen into chaos, did not hesitate to march forth against the vast army of victorious nations and has already turned the tables decisively against them. — Winston Churchill

The Germans are fond of saying that only Austria could convince the world that Beethoven was an Austrian and Hitler was a German. — Daniel Silva

In California, we are a sixty percent Hispanic state, we elected an Austrian governor. Even old Nazis are going That's weird. — Robin Williams

The only reason I'm friends with any of you is because I outgrew the von Trapps, one annoying Austrian at a time. — Lisa Mantchev

There are many nations that have perfected a particular room. You know, you have the French drawing-room, the Austrian ball room, the German dining room, and I think the library is a room the English get right. — Julian Fellowes

I'm criticizing the way they are perceived. I was going through a book of Marina Abramovic and Ulay's 1970s performance work the other day. These people did two, even three Documentas or Venice Biennales over the course of a decade without any fuss. They would just treat it as any of their other engagements, with the same level of dignity and commitment they'd reserve for a one-day event in a small gallery on the Austrian mountains. — Maurizio Cattelan

Austrians were allowed to paper over their pasts and portray themselves as unwilling participants. They felt sorry for themselves, and for the proud family names sullied with the taint of Nazi collaboration. The Cold War began in earnest, and the West was eager to hang on to Austria. A 1948 amnesty brought a premature end to Austrian de-Nazification. Austrians began to deny their jubilant welcome of Hitler and to claim that Austria had been "occupied" by Germany, like — Anne-Marie O'Connor

Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status. — Isabel Paterson

The law is guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish. — Frederic Bastiat

The welfare of a people lies not in casting other peoples down but in peaceful collaboration. — Ludwig Von Mises

I know I have a strong India connect. Is it Subhash Chandra Bose or my father who left my Austrian mother when I was one? - Catherine Khan — Tuhin A. Sinha

Thus, be every device from the stick to the carrot, the emaciated Austrian donkey is made to pull the Nazi barrow up an ever-steepening hill. — Winston Churchill

Somehow Chinese toxins fit right in with the Don's taste in gear. Austrian shotgun shells, Cuban baseball bats, Israeli silencers, Russian things he could only guess at - the Don was known for his upscale mob accessories. — Bruce Rousseau

Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors. "So that's what war looks like!" von Trapp wrote in a later memoir. He told his chief officer, "We are like highway men, sneaking up on an unsuspecting ship in such a cowardly fashion. — Erik Larson

ONE OF THE first things the Nazis did was to distribute 100,000 free radio sets to the Austrian Christians. Where did they get these radios? From us, of course. Right after the Anschluss, the Jews were required to turn in their typewriters and their radios, the idea being that if we could not communicate with each other or the outside world, we would be isolated and more easily terrorized and manipulated. It was a good idea. It worked well. — Edith Hahn Beer

The government is a giant logjam in the eternal river of human potential. — Stefan Molyneux

I'm not into the whole Austrian type, strongly libertarian economics. I like more mainstream economics — Robert Sarvis

I never dreamed I would receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, mostly because my style is so typically Austrian. — Tina Fey

The entrepreneur who is reckoning in terms of a currency with a stable value is unable to compete with the entrepreneur who is prepared to make a quasi-gift of part of his capital to his customers. In 1920 and 1921, Dutch traders who had sold commodities to Austria could buy them back again after a while much cheaper than they had originally sold them, because the Austrian traders completely failed to see that they were selling them for less than they had cost. — Ludwig Von Mises

I wasn't born Austrian; I wasn't born German. My roots are from Africa, and I do not have any reason for not wanting to celebrate that. Every time that I can, I like to kind of mention it, you know, just to keep people sort of knowing exactly what's going on. My French is pretty good, but I'm still African, thank you very much. — Jessye Norman

As a child in Sydney, my German Mum and my Austrian Dad would spontaneously tell me stories about what they saw and what they did as children. It was like a piece of Europe coming into our house ... Those stories led me to my writing. — Markus Zusak

I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed. — Gustav Mahler

Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State's inhabitants, or subjects. — Murray N. Rothbard

I finished my studies in England, I opened my studio in London, and the first one-man exhibit I had on Bond Street, which was opened by the Austrian ambassador. — Felix De Weldon

Even Austrian landladies recognise the hand of destiny at work. — Susanna Kearsley

There was just such a man when I was young - an Austrian who invented a new way of life and convinced himself that he was the chap to make it work. He tried to impose his reformation by the sword, and plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos. But the thing which this fellow had overlooked, my friend, was that he had a predecessor in the reformation business, called Jesus Christ. Perhaps we may assume that Jesus knew as much as the Austrian did about saving people. But the odd thing is that Jesus did not turn the disciples into strom troopers, burn down the Temple at Jerusalem, and fix the blame on Pontius Pilate. On the contrary, he made it clear that the business of the philosopher was to make ideas available, and not to impose them on people. — T.H. White

It's important to remember something: California is not a state built on moderation. We invented motion pictures. We made an electric sports car. We're both the brain (Silicon Valley) and the heart (Hollywood, alas) of this great nation, and meanwhile we grow everyone's strawberries. We're open to innovation. We're open to new ideas. We're open to odd couples - and to strays from all parts of the world. Look at our last governor: an Austrian body builder and son of a Nazi married to John F. Kennedy's niece. Anything can happen. — Scott Hutchins

Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people. — Robert Higgs

Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things. Only economic action has created the wealth around us; labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness. Peace builds, war destroys. — Ludwig Von Mises

The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the Austrian and the American. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Austrian School came into existence when a bunch of Viennese rent-gouging landlords didn't want rent control on the rents they could gouge out of their tenants in old Vienna, so they hired a bunch of scribblers - and that's the Austrian School. — Webster Tarpley

He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them. — Ludwig Von Mises

When the Habsburg State crumbled to pieces in 1918 the Austrian Germans instinctively raised an outcry for union with their German fatherland. That was the voice of a unanimous yearning in the hearts of the whole people for a return to the unforgotten home of their fathers. — Adolf Hitler

His features are strong and masculine, with an Austrian lip and arched nose, his complexion olive, his countenance erect, his body and limbs well proportioned, all his motions graceful, and his deportment majestic. He — Jonathan Swift

But such a general yearning could not be explained except by attributing the cause of it to the historical training through which the individual Austrian Germans had passed. — Adolf Hitler

No man can rightfully be required to join, or support, an association whose protection he does not desire. — Lysander Spooner

It was also interesting to see that political interaction in Europe is not that different from the United States Senate. There's a lot of
I don't know what the term is in Austrian, wheeling and dealing."
confusing German for "Austrian," a language which does not exist, Strasbourg, France, April 6, 2009 — Barack Obama

Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly "reforming" their own handiwork? Education reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact they're always busy "reforming" is an implicit admission that they didn't get it right the first 50 times. — Lawrence W. Reed

In fiction, I have been on a Zweig kick. In England over December, I noticed that many British newspapers' year-end recommenders were praising the Pushkin Press for reissuing several works by Stefan Zweig, a brilliant Austrian writer whose work brings to mind that of his compatriot Joseph Roth ... these fictions are a treat of prewar European literature — Sylvia Brownrigg

I am thrice homeless, as a bohemian, as an Austrian, and all over the world, you guessed it right I am Jewish — Gustav Mahler

Ultimately, we need to take control over the money supply out of the hands of our governments and make the production of money again subject to the principle of free association. The first step to endorsing and promoting this strategy is to realize that governments do not - indeed cannot - fulfill any positive role whatever through the control of our money. — Jorg Guido Hulsmann

The more the linguistic Babel corroded and disorganized parliament, the closer drew the inevitable hour of the disintegration of this Babylonian Empire, and with it the hour of freedom for my German-Austrian people. — Adolf Hitler

I can't resist telling you that when the Vienna Economics Institute celebrated its centennial, many years ago, they invited, as their keynote speaker, my father [John Kenneth Galbraith]. The leading economists of the Austrian school- including von Hayek and von Haberler - returned for the occasion. And so my father took a moment to reflect on the economic triumphs of the Austrian Republic since the war, which, he said, "would not have been possible without the contribution of these men." They nodded - briefly - until it dawned on them what he meant. They'd all left the country in the 1930s. — James K. Galbraith

My speaking style was criticised by no less an authority than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a low moment, my friends, to have my rhetorical skills denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg. — Boris Johnson

In effect, I was asking that if Russia mobilized against Austria, the German Government, who had been supporting the Austrian demand on Serbia, should ask Austria to consider some modification of her demands, under the threat of Russian mobilization. — Edward Grey

The error in this conclusion may be most simply demonstrated by means of an actual example. Let us select for this purpose the monetary history of Austria, which Laughlin also uses as an illustration. From 1859 onwards the Austrian National Bank was released from the obligation to convert its notes on demand into silver, and nobody could tell when the State paper-money issued in 1866 would be redeemed, or even if it would be redeemed at all. It was not until the later 'nineties that the transition to metallic money was completed by the actual resumption of cash payments on the part of the Austro-Hungarian Bank. — Ludwig Von Mises

We wanted to bring the political situation in Austria on stage. Naturally we could not do that without pointing to Austrian's northern neighbor Germany. — Leon Askin