Top 300 Milton Friedman Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “There is not a line in ‘The Wealth of Nations’ that is not still applicable to this day.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

153. “Undoubtedly Internet has reduced the possibilities of taxation. Why should I buy something here if I can buy it from a company in Japan or England or Brazil with a lower tax?”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

155. “Why is it that private insurance companies are not in trouble because people are getting older? Aren’t they subject to the same demographics? The difference is that they’ve accumulated a fund, not a pay-in, pay-out system.”

— Milton Friedman

156. “The broader and more influential organisations of businessmen have acted to undermine the basic foundation of the free market system they purport to represent and defend.”

— Milton Friedman

157. “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

158. “The family, rather than the individual, has always been and remains today the basic building block of our society, though its hold has clearly been weakening – one of the most unfortunate consequences of the growth of government paternalism.”

— Milton Friedman

159. “The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can’t do that.”

— Milton Friedman

160. “Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised.”

— Milton Friedman

161. “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

162. “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

163. “When you have a time of crisis what happens depends on what ideas are floating around, and what ideas have been developed, and thought through, and are made effective.”

— Milton Friedman

164. “The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn’t do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn’t do a thing for them.”

— Milton Friedman

165. “Hong Kong is the bellwether. If the Chinese stick to their agreement to let Hong Kong go its own path, then China will also go that way. If they don’t, that is a very bad sign. I’m optimistic.”

— Milton Friedman

166. “The use of quantity of money as a target has not been a success. I’m not sure that I would as of today push it as hard as I once did.”

— Milton Friedman

167. “The Great Depression in the United States, far from being a sign of the inherent instability of the private enterprise system, is a testament to how much harm can be done by mistakes on the part of a few men when they wield vast power over the monetary system of the country.”

— Milton Friedman

168. “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

169. “What is not forbidden in Sweden, is obligatory.”

— Milton Friedman

170. “I have long been a critic of Social Security, basically because I believe that it is not the business of government to tell people what fraction of their incomes they should devote to providing for their own or someone else’s old age.”

— Milton Friedman

171. “Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery.”

— Milton Friedman

172. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

174. “Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion – the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals – the technique of the marketplace.”

— Milton Friedman

175. “You must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business.”

— Milton Friedman

176. “The power to do good is also the power to do harm.”

— Milton Friedman

177. “World trade depends on differences among countries, not similarities. Different countries are in different stages of development. It is appropriate for them to have different patterns, different policies for ecology, labor standards, and so forth.”

— Milton Friedman

178. “The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system.”

— Milton Friedman

179. “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

181. “It is a mark of how far we have gone on the road to serfdom that government allocation and rationing of oil is the automatic response to the oil crisis.”

— Milton Friedman

182. “History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.”

— Milton Friedman

183. “The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that’s why it’s so essential to preserving individual freedom.”

— Milton Friedman

184. “The key insight of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.”

— Milton Friedman

185. “If you continue to use monetary policy to attempt to promote full employment the result would be that you would have higher inflation, and that you would not have lower unemployment.”

— Milton Friedman

186. “A crackpot theory. Instead of saying labor’s exploited, as Marx did, Kelso says capital’s exploited. It’s worse than Marx. It’s Marx stood on its head.”

— Milton Friedman

187. “In response to a suggestion that total free trade would end in cheaper foreign products flooding the market and causing unemployment.”

— Milton Friedman

188. “The euro is good for Europe. But only if there is flexibility all around.”

— Milton Friedman

189. “The present oil crisis has not been produced by the oil companies. It is a result of government mismanagement exacerbated by the Mideast war.”

— Milton Friedman

190. “There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.”

— Milton Friedman

191. “If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven’t cut taxes enough.”

— Milton Friedman

192. “Abraham Lincoln talked about a government of the people, by the people, for the people. What we now have is a government of the people, by the bureaucrats, including the legislators who have become bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats.”

— Milton Friedman

193. “It doesn’t worry me a bit that China and Japan hold so much US debt. In a way, it seems foolish for them to do it because they get lower returns than they might elsewhere. But that is their business.”

— Milton Friedman

194. “A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.”

— Milton Friedman

195. “The power to do good is also the power to do harm; those who control the power today may not tomorrow; and, more important, what one man regards as good, another may regard as harm.”

— Milton Friedman

196. “The most harm of all is done when power is in the hands of people who are absolutely persuaded of the purity of their instincts – and the purity of their intentions.”

— Milton Friedman

197. “The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes.”

— Milton Friedman

198. “If you really want to engage in policy activity, don’t make that your vocation. Make it your avocation. Get a job. Get a secure base of income. Otherwise, you’re going to get corrupted and destroyed.”

— Milton Friedman

199. “With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.”

— Milton Friedman

200. “Not all ‘schooling’ is ‘education,’ and not all ‘education’ is ‘schooling’.”

— Milton Friedman