How can it be that institutions which serve the common welfare and are — Carl Menger

"The development of economics as a science which is always based on human beings, the creative actors and protagonists in all social processes and events (the subjectivist conception), is undoubtedly the most significant and characteristic contribution made by the Austrian School of economics, founded by Carl Menger. In fact Menger felt it vital to abandon the sterile objectivism of the classical (Anglo-Saxon) school whose members were obsessed with the supposed existence of external objective entities (social classes, aggregates, material factors of production, etc.). Menger held that economists should instead always adopt the subjectivist view of human beings who act, and that this perspective should invariably exert a decisive influence on the way all economic theories are formulated, in terms of their scientific content and their practical conclusions and results."

"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."

"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."

"Almost everything that makes the Austrian school of economics distinctive was found in Menger—marginal utility, subjective value, emphasis on knowledge and foreknowledge, the importance of prices, spontaneous generation of societal institutions, and economic activity as a process occurring over time. From a more practical perspective, during the 1890s and early 1900s, he was the informal leader of a group of civil servants and academics who regularly met for coffee at Vienna’s famous coffeehouses to discuss the issues of the day."

"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."