Top 300 Milton Friedman Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

162. “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

163. “Sloppy writing reflects sloppy thinking.”

— Milton Friedman

164. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

166. “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

167. “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

168. “Political leaders in capitalist countries who cheer the collapse of socialism in other countries continue to favor socialist solutions in their own. They know the words, but they have not learned the tune.”

— Milton Friedman

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169. “Politicians will always spend every penny of tax raised and whatever else they can get away with.”

— Milton Friedman

170. “Rapid increases in the quantity of money produce inflation. Sharp decreases produce depression.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

172. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

174. “There is no person, no theorist so reckless as he who says that the facts speak for themselves.”

— Milton Friedman

175. “How do you hold down government spending?”

— Milton Friedman

176. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

178. “You mustn’t judge a politician by talk. You have to judge them by performance.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

180. “Government actions often provide substantial benefits to a few while imposing small costs on many.”

— Milton Friedman

181. “I think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior.”

— Milton Friedman

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “What would the people who sold us goods do with the money? They’d get dollars. What would they do with the dollars? Eat them?!”

— Milton Friedman

198. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

200. “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

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