Daily Inspiration Quote by Ludwig von Mises

Mises slips a moral limiter into what usually reads like a cold, technical term. “Sovereignty” is the state’s favorite trump card: the word governments deploy to end arguments, justify crackdowns, and wave off outside scrutiny. By insisting it “must not be used” to harm “anyone,” he’s puncturing the romance of absolute power. The line is less civics-class than warning label: if sovereignty is treated as sacred, cruelty becomes administrative.

The phrasing matters. He doesn’t say sovereignty is illegitimate; he says it’s conditional. That’s a very Mises move: keep the institution, strip it of mystical license. “Citizen or foreigner” is the sharper jab. Nationalism usually draws a thick moral border around the passport-holder, treating outsiders as fair game for tariffs, expropriation, war, or bureaucratic humiliation. Mises rejects the implied hierarchy. Harm doesn’t become morally cleaner because the victim is on the other side of a frontier.

Contextually, this lands in a 20th-century Europe where states repeatedly invoked sovereignty to rationalize conscription, censorship, ethnic scapegoating, and total war. Mises, a liberal in the classical sense and a critic of militarism and central planning, had watched “reasons of state” metastasize into routine violence. The subtext is that sovereignty is not a blank check but a responsibility bounded by individual rights. Read that way, the quote doubles as a critique of both domestic repression and foreign adventurism: the same machinery that claims the right to manage an economy can claim the right to manage lives.