Top 300 Milton Friedman Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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103. “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

104. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

107. “The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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115. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

117. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

126. “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

127. “Sloppy writing reflects sloppy thinking.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

134. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

136. “If freedom were not so economically efficient it certainly wouldn’t stand a chance.”

— Milton Friedman

137. “Americans know very little about social statistics, but I am not sure that it’s important that Americans know about social statistics.”

— Milton Friedman

138. “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

139. “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

140. “So long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

— Milton Friedman

141. “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

142. “Well first of all, tell me, is there some society you know of that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed?”

— Milton Friedman

143. “We don’t have a desperate need to grow. We have a desperate desire to grow.”

— Milton Friedman

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

147. “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

148. “The central banks cannot control interest rates. That’s a mistake. They can control a particular rate, such as the Federal Funds rate, if they want to, but they can’t control interest rates.”

— Milton Friedman

149. “If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.”

— Milton Friedman

150. “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