Carl Menger Quotes

How can it be that institutions which serve the common welfare and are extremely significant for its development come into being without a common will directed toward establishing them?

Assuming... that all available goods of higher order are employed in the most economic fashion, the value of a concrete quantity of a good of higher order is equal to the difference in importance between the satisfactions that can be attained when we have command of the given quantity of the good of higher order whose value we wish to determine and the satisfactions that would be attained if we did not have this quantity at our command.

The time period lying between command of goods of a higher order and possession of the corresponding goods of lower order can never be eliminated.

There is no better means of reducing a fallacious variety of thought to absurdity than to let it live itself out completely.

Not only in the realm of the ethical world, and of economy, but also in that of natural phenomena, the realistic orientation of theoretical research can lead only to "real types" and "empirical laws." And in the above point of view, at any rate, no essential difference between the ethical and the natural sciences exists, but at most only one of degree. The realistic orientation of theoretical research excludes in principle, rather, in all realms of the world of phenomena the possibility of arriving at strict (exact) theoretical knowledge.

The solution of the most important problems of the theoretical social sciences in general and of theoretical economics in particular is thus, closely connected with the question of theoretically understanding the origin and change of 'organically' created social structures.