Top 300 Milton Friedman Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.”

— Milton Friedman

52. “I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.”

— Milton Friedman

53. “The history of mankind is the history of money losing value.”

— Milton Friedman

54. “When something goes wrong, the natural tendency is to say, “By God, we need to pass a law and do something.””

— Milton Friedman

55. “If you do not force political freedom, economic freedom will be stymied sooner or later.”

— Milton Friedman

56. “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”

— Milton Friedman

57. “Not all schooling is education nor all education, schooling.”

— Milton Friedman

58. “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

59. “What kind of society isn’t structured on greed?”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

61. “The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power – we must have a dispersion of power.”

— Milton Friedman

62. “The facts never speak for themselves. They have to be interpreted in terms of some understanding of where they come from and what the relation between them is.”

— Milton Friedman

63. “Governments never learn. Only people learn.”

— Milton Friedman

64. “The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.”

— Milton Friedman

65. “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.”

— Milton Friedman

66. “See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That’s literally true.”

— Milton Friedman

67. “Humility is the distinguishing virtue of the believer in freedom; arrogance, of the paternalist.”

— Milton Friedman

68. “Theories can be based on any assumptions, however bizarre.”

— Milton Friedman

69. “Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.”

— Milton Friedman

70. “Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.”

— Milton Friedman

71. “Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.”

— Milton Friedman

72. “There is no good way of measuring poverty.”

— Milton Friedman

73. “The one thing that’s missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash, a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B, without A knowing B or B knowing A.”

— Milton Friedman

74. “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

75. “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

76. “Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today’s disadvantaged to become tomorrow’s privileged and, in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a fuller and richer life.”

— Milton Friedman

77. “Making prohibition work is like making water run uphill; it’s against nature.”

— Milton Friedman

78. “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

79. “Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.”

— Milton Friedman

80. “People who intend only to serve public interest are led by invisible hand to private interest which was no part of their intention.”

— Milton Friedman

81. “There’s no doubt in my mind that Ronald Reagan was by far the greatest. Because he had real principles and he stuck by them. He made clear what he was going to do, and he did it. He didn’t back down.”

— Milton Friedman

82. “The invisible hand in politics operates in the opposite direction to the invisible hand in the market.”

— Milton Friedman

83. “My interest in political philosophy was rather casual until I met Hayek.”

— Milton Friedman

84. “There’s nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.”

— Milton Friedman

85. “The fall of the Berlin Wall did more for the progress of freedom than all of the books written by myself or Friedrich Hayek or others.”

— Milton Friedman

86. “The fall of the Berlin Wall really demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was a bad system, and what subsequently happened in the Soviet Union, that that system was a failure.”

— Milton Friedman

87. “Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without.”

— Milton Friedman

88. “We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.”

— Milton Friedman

89. “I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government.”

— Milton Friedman

90. “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

91. “The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books.”

— Milton Friedman

92. “The future of private enterprise capitalism is also the future of a free society. There is no possibility of having a politically free society unless the major part of its economic resources are operated under a capitalistic private enterprise system.”

— Milton Friedman

93. “You never have real changes unless you have a time of crisis.”

— Milton Friedman

94. “The euro is going to be a big source of problems, not a source of help.”

— Milton Friedman

95. “We had much freer trade in the 19th century. We have much less globalization now than we did then.”

— Milton Friedman

96. “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

97. “Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?”

— Milton Friedman

98. “What does it mean to say that government might have a responsibility? Government can’t have a responsibility any more than the business can. The only entities which can have responsibilities are people.”

— Milton Friedman

99. “So long as large sums of money are involved – and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal – it is literally impossible to stop the traffic, or even to make a serious reduction in its scope.”

— Milton Friedman

100. “There’s no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn’t exist.”

— Milton Friedman