Top 300 Milton Friedman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

— Milton Friedman

Featured in: Quotes About Money, Witty Quotes

2. “Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

— Milton Friedman

Featured in: Freedom Quotes, Quotes on Liberty

3. “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

Featured in: Freedom Quotes

4. “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

— Milton Friedman

Featured in: Sarcastic Quotes, Government Quotes, Quotes on Liberty

5. “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

— Milton Friedman

Featured in: Accountability Quotes, Efficiency Quotes

6. “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

— Milton Friedman

7. “The government doesn’t have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others.”

— Milton Friedman

8. “The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.”

— Milton Friedman

9. “If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don’t be surprised if you get unemployment.”

— Milton Friedman

10. “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”

— Milton Friedman

Featured in: Real Quotes

11. “The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.”

— Milton Friedman

12. “Statistics do not speak for themselves.”

— Milton Friedman

13. “You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.”

— Milton Friedman

14. “Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. It is made by or stopped by the central bank.”

— Milton Friedman

15. “The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.”

— Milton Friedman

16. “I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.”

— Milton Friedman

17. “The Internet is the most effective instrument we have for globalization.”

— Milton Friedman

18. “The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.”

— Milton Friedman

19. “A free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.”

— Milton Friedman

Featured in: Country Quotes

20. “Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.”

— Milton Friedman

21. “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”

— Milton Friedman

22. “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.”

— Milton Friedman

23. “Adam Smith’s key insight was that both parties to an exchange can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange can take place unless both parties do benefit.”

— Milton Friedman

24. “Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.”

— Milton Friedman

Featured in: Real Quotes

25. “Never try to walk across a river just because it has an average depth of four feet.”

— Milton Friedman

26. “He moves fastest who moves alone.”

— Milton Friedman

27. “A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.”

— Milton Friedman

28. “Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.”

— Milton Friedman

29. “The real tragedy of minimum wage laws is that they are supported by well-meaning groups who want to reduce poverty. But the people who are hurt most by higher minimums are the most poverty stricken.”

— Milton Friedman

Featured in: Real Quotes

30. “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.”

— Milton Friedman

31. “And where are you going to get these angels who are going to run society for us?”

— Milton Friedman

32. “Inflation is taxation without legislation.”

— Milton Friedman

33. “Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.”

— Milton Friedman

34. “When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.”

— Milton Friedman

35. “Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems.”

— Milton Friedman

Featured in: Real Quotes

36. “Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions.”

— Milton Friedman

37. “The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a, from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way.”

— Milton Friedman

38. “The word ‘free’ is used three times in the Declaration of Independence and once in the First Amendment to the Constitution, along with ‘freedom.’ The word ‘fair’ is not used in either of our founding documents.”

— Milton Friedman

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

39. “The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.”

— Milton Friedman

40. “How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect? Freedom is a rare and delicate plan.”

— Milton Friedman

41. “The stock market and economy are two different things.”

— Milton Friedman

42. “There is one and only one responsibility of business: to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.”

— Milton Friedman

43. “I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40 percent of our national income.”

— Milton Friedman

44. “I would say that in this world, the greatest source of inequality has been special privileges granted by government.”

— Milton Friedman

45. “When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union – like public housing in the United States – look decrepit within a year or two of their construction...”

— Milton Friedman

46. “A society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty. And a society that aims first for liberty will not end up with equality, but it will end up with a closer approach to equality than any other kind of system that has ever been developed.”

— Milton Friedman

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

47. “You can only make money if you buy a product, whatever it is – maybe a currency, maybe wheat and maybe something else – at a relatively low price and sell it at a higher price than you buy it at. There’s no other way to make money.”

— Milton Friedman

Featured in: Making Money Quotes

48. “All learning is ultimately self-learning.”

— Milton Friedman

49. “I am a limited-government libertarian.”

— Milton Friedman

50. “The benefits of a tariff are visible. Union workers can see they are “protected”. The harm which a tariff does is invisible. It’s spread widely. There are people that don’t have jobs because of tariffs but they don’t know it.”

— Milton Friedman