Top 300 Milton Friedman Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “To really understand something you’ve got to reduce it to its principles.”

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

— Milton Friedman

54. “Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

62. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

Featured in: Quotes About Greed

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

— Milton Friedman

65. “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

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. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

71. “Reality ensures that the end of history will never come.”

— Milton Friedman

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

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

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

— Milton Friedman

82. “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

Featured in: Real Quotes

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

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

85. “Inflation is caused by too much money chasing after too few goods.”

— Milton Friedman

86. “Anything that government can do, private enterprise can do for half the cost.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

88. “The price works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time.”

— Milton Friedman

89. “It’s always so attractive to be able to do good at somebody else’s expense.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

91. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

92. “You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.”

— Milton Friedman

93. “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

94. “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

95. “Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.”

— Milton Friedman

96. “Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

98. “There is only one social responsibility of business.”

— Milton Friedman

99. “Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?”

— Milton Friedman

100. “Society doesn’t have values. People have values.”

— Milton Friedman