Milton Friedman Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Milton Friedman quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
'Deserves' is an impossible thing to decide. No one deserves anything. Thank God we don't get what we deserve.
— Milton Friedman
When something goes wrong, the natural tendency is to say, "By God, we need to pass a law and do something."
— Milton Friedman
Inflation is taxation without legislation
— Milton Friedman
With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.
— Milton Friedman
Theories can be based on any assumptions, however bizarre.
— Milton Friedman
How do you hold down government spending?
— Milton Friedman
Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay
— Milton Friedman
Unfortunately, unanimity is not always feasible.
— Milton Friedman
Governments never learn. Only people learn.
— Milton Friedman
I do not believe there is a natural resource economics. I believe there is good economics and bad economics.
— Milton Friedman
Rapid increases in the quantity of money produce inflation. Sharp decreases produce depression.
— Milton Friedman
Saying it is one thing. Doing it is very different.
— Milton Friedman
Silence was pleased.
— Milton Friedman
You never have real changes unless you have a time of crisis.
— Milton Friedman
How can thinking people believe that a government that cannot deliver the mail can deliver gas better than Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf, and the rest?
— Milton Friedman
Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
— Milton Friedman
Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power.
— Milton Friedman
I would say that in this world, the greatest source of inequality has been special privileges granted by government.
— Milton Friedman
The government doesn't have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others.
— Milton Friedman
You know there are very few Marxists left in the world ... they're all in American universities.
— Milton Friedman
Complete free trade is not politically feasible. Why? Because it's only in the general interest and in no one's special interest.
— Milton Friedman
You must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business.
— Milton Friedman
A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.
— Milton Friedman
The price works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time.
— Milton Friedman
You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.
— Milton Friedman
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
— Milton Friedman
There is no good way of measuring poverty.
— Milton Friedman
Columbus did not seek a new route to the Indies in response to a majority directive.
— Milton Friedman
Never try to walk across a river just because it has an average depth of four feet.
— Milton Friedman
The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.
— Milton Friedman
Personal freedom has grown greatly within China, and that will provoke ever more points of conflict between the individual and state.
— Milton Friedman
There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.
— Milton Friedman
You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.
— Milton Friedman
The essential notion of a capitalist society ... is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.
— Milton Friedman
Not all schooling is education nor all education, schooling.
— Milton Friedman
Money is a very powerful thing, which you hardly notice when it goes right, but which can create havoc when it goes wrong.
— Milton Friedman
The big problem for a democratic government - democrat with a small "d" - is how to hold down government spending.
— Milton Friedman
If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don't be surprised if you get unemployment.
— Milton Friedman
There's nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.
— Milton Friedman
I am a limited-government libertarian.
— Milton Friedman
If China don't free up the political side, its economic growth will come to an end - while it is still at a very low level.
— Milton Friedman
Anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.
— Milton Friedman
Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That's not a statement, it's a definition.
— Milton Friedman
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
— Pierre Dos Utt
[T]he burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes, but by how much it spends.
— Milton Friedman
Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters' own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.
— Milton Friedman
I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.
— Milton Friedman
You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.
— Milton Friedman
Sloppy writing reflects sloppy thinking.
— Milton Friedman
Everywhere, and at all times, economic progress has meant far more to the poor than to the rich.
— Milton Friedman
History only suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
— Milton Friedman
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
— Milton Friedman
Statistics do not speak for themselves.
— Milton Friedman
Children are responsible individuals in embryo. They have ultimate rights of their own and are not simply the playthings of their parents.
— Milton Friedman
A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.
— Milton Friedman
All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.
— George Stigler
Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.
— Milton Friedman
In response to a suggestion that total free trade would end in cheaper foreign products flooding the market and causing unemployment.
— Milton Friedman
The Internet is the most effective instrument we have for globalization.
— Milton Friedman
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
— Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman's misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Reality ensures that the end of history will never come.
— Milton Friedman
What is not forbidden in Sweden, is obligatory.
— Milton Friedman
Theories should be judged by their ability to predict events rather than by the realism of their assumptions.
— Milton Friedman
If freedom were not so economically efficient it certainly wouldn't stand a chance.
— Milton Friedman
There is no law of conservation which forces the growth of new centers of economic strength to be at the expense of existing centers.
— Milton Friedman
A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
— Milton Friedman
One of the reasons that I am in favor of less government is because when you have more government, industrialists take it over.
— Milton Friedman
The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating.
— Milton Friedman
[U]nemployment is ... a side effect of the cure for inflation.
— Milton Friedman
The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
— Milton Friedman
The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power.
— Milton Friedman
The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.
— Milton Friedman
I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.
— Milton Friedman
He moves fastest who moves alone.
— Milton Friedman
Americans know very little about social statistics, but I am not sure that it's important that Americans know about social statistics.
— Milton Friedman
I am convinced that the minimum-wage law is the most anti-Negro law on our statute books in its effect, not its intent.
— Milton Friedman
A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman's famous 'helicopter drop' of money.
— Ben Bernanke
There are severe limits to the good that the government can do for the economy, but there are almost no limits to the harm it can do.
— Milton Friedman
The euro is going to be a big source of problems, not a source of help.
— Milton Friedman
Now that I'm 60, every morning I look in the mirror and say, "I don't know who you are, stranger, but I'm gonna shave you anyway".
— Milton Friedman
The present oil crisis has not been produced by the oil companies. It is a result of government mismanagement exacerbated by the Mideast war.
— Milton Friedman
Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
— Milton Friedman
The stock market and economy are two different things.
— Milton Friedman
The only reason free markets have a ghost of a chance is that they are so much more efficient than any other form of organization.
— Milton Friedman
The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power - we must have a dispersion of power.
— Milton Friedman
There's no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn't exist.
— Milton Friedman
Believers in aristocracy and socialism share a faith in centralized rule, in rule by command rather than by voluntary cooperation.
— Milton Friedman
The case against a fully independent central bank is strong indeed.
— Milton Friedman
The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.
— Milton Friedman
The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximize its profits.
— Milton Friedman