Top 300 Milton Friedman Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I think it’s a scandal what has been happening in the school system so far as lower income classes. The dropout rates, the illiteracy rate, you know literacy in the United States was a lot higher in 1890 than it is now.”

— Milton Friedman

102. “Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

104. “On aging societies, there is no reason why a country that has a lot of old people can’t be prosperous if, during their working lives, individuals provide for their retirement.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

106. “The long-range sloution to high unemployment is to increase the incentive for ordinary people to save, invest, work, and employ others. We make it costly for employers to employ people; we subsidize people not to go to work We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

109. “The free market is not only a more efficient decision maker than even the wisest central planning body, but even more important, the free market keeps economic power widely dispersed.”

— Milton Friedman

110. “We economists don’t know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can’t sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you’ll have a tomato shortage. It’s the same with oil or gas.”

— Milton Friedman

111. “Cutting government spending and government intrusion in the economy will almost surely involve immediate gain for the many, short-term pain for the few, and long-term gain for all.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

113. “In a bureaucratic system, useless work drives out useful work.”

— Milton Friedman

114. “No major institution in the US has so poor a record of performance over so long a period as the Federal Reserve, yet so high a public reputation.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

116. “So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear. That there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

119. “Socialism, in the traditional sense, meant government ownership and operation of the means of production. Outside of North Korea and a couple of other spots, no one in the world today would define socialism that way. That will never come back.”

— Milton Friedman

120. “The black market was a way of getting around government controls. It was a way of enabling the free market to work. It was a way of opening up, enabling people.”

— Milton Friedman

121. “Government is a way by which every individual believes he can live at the expense of everybody else.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

123. “The evidence of history speaks with a single voice. I do not know any exception to the proposition that if you compare like with like, the freer the system, the better off the ordinary poor people have been.”

— Milton Friedman

124. “When a private enterprise fails, it is closed down; when a government enterprise fails, it is expanded. Isn’t that exactly what’s been happening with drugs?”

— Milton Friedman

125. “There is all the difference in the world, however, between two kinds of assistance through government that seem superficially similar: first, 90 percent of us agreeing to impose taxes on ourselves in order to help the bottom 10 percent, and second, 80 percent voting to impose taxes on the top 10 percent to help the bottom 10 percent – William Graham Sumner’s famous example of B and C deciding what D shall do for A.”

— Milton Friedman

126. “The role of government just considered is to do something that the market cannot do for itself, namely, to determine, arbitrate, and enforce the rules of the game.”

— Milton Friedman

127. “The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.”

— Milton Friedman

128. “The Internet moves us closer to “perfect information” on markets. Individuals and companies alike can buy and sell across borders and jurisdictions wherever they find the best match of supply and demand.”

— Milton Friedman

129. “One man’s opportunism is another man’s statesmanship.”

— Milton Friedman

130. “We have a freer world because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the changes in China. Those two have been the main contributors to freedom in our time.”

— Milton Friedman

131. “Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.”

— Milton Friedman

132. “There’s a smokestack on the back of every government program.”

— Milton Friedman

133. “Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.”

— Milton Friedman

134. “The government has no more right to tell me what goes into my mouth, including illegal drugs, than it has to tell me what comes out of my mouth.”

— Milton Friedman

135. “So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not.”

— Milton Friedman

136. “In the US, the problem is primary and secondary education. We’ve had such an increase in inequality because a quarter of American kids don’t finish high school!”

— Milton Friedman

137. “Saying it is one thing. Doing it is very different.”

— Milton Friedman

138. “Exchange is truly voluntary only when nearly equivalent alternatives exist. Monopoly implies the absence of alternatives and thereby inhibits effective freedom of exchange.”

— Milton Friedman

139. “Columbus did not seek a new route to the Indies in response to a majority directive.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

141. “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

142. “The big problem for a democratic government – democrat with a small “d” – is how to hold down government spending.”

— Milton Friedman

143. “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

144. “Sloppy writing reflects sloppy thinking.”

— Milton Friedman

145. “One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.”

— Milton Friedman

146. “It’s a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don’t approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else.”

— Milton Friedman

147. “If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.”

— Milton Friedman

148. “By encouraging men to spy and report on one another, by making it in the private interest of large numbers of citizens to evade the controls, and by making actions illegal that are in the public interest, the controls undermine individual morality.”

— Milton Friedman

149. “Anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.”

— Milton Friedman

150. “There is not a line in ‘The Wealth of Nations’ that is not still applicable to this day.”

— Milton Friedman