Top 300 Milton Friedman Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “It is extremely convenient to have a label for the political and economic viewpoint elaborated in this book. The rightful and proper label is liberalism. Unfortunately, “As a supreme, if unintended compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label”,′ so that liberalism has, in the United States, come to have a very different meaning than it did in the nineteenth century or does today over much of the Continent of Europe.”

— Milton Friedman

252. “Rich people are the experimental ground for every new development. The nature of progress is that what begins as a luxury for the rich becomes a necessity for the poor as it’s developed and passed on.”

— Milton Friedman

253. “The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument. And the emotional faculties are more highly developed in most men than the rational, paradoxically or especially even in those who regard themselves as intellectuals.”

— Milton Friedman

254. “How did we make the transition from using wood to using coal, from using coal to using oil, from using oil to using natural gas? How in God’s name did we make that transition without a Federal Energy Agency?”

— Milton Friedman

255. “John Lott documents how far ‘politically correct’ vested interests are willing to go to denigrate anyone who dares disagree with them. Lott has done us all a service by his thorough, thoughtful scholarly approach to a highly controversial issue.”

— Milton Friedman

256. “Although these examples only scratch the surface, they illustrate the fundamental proposition that freedom is one whole, that anything that reduces freedom in one part of our lives is likely to affect freedom in the other parts.”

— Milton Friedman

257. “The widespread enthusiasm for reducing government taxes and other impositions is not matched by a comparable enthusiasm for eliminating government programs – except programs that benefit other people. The.”

— Milton Friedman

258. “I’d like to promote lots of things. I’d like to promote elimination of drug prohibition. I’d like to promote parental choice in education through vouchers. Those are two things I think are very urgent and important. They’re both more important than the harm which Social Security will do.”

— Milton Friedman

259. “To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.”

— Milton Friedman

260. “Germany’s problem, in part, is that it went into the euro at the wrong exchange rate that overvalued the deutsche mark.”

— Milton Friedman

261. “Children are responsible individuals in embryo. They have ultimate rights of their own and are not simply the playthings of their parents.”

— Milton Friedman

262. “The only reason free markets have a ghost of a chance is that they are so much more efficient than any other form of organization.”

— Milton Friedman

263. “Japan has introduced fiscal stimulus five times in the past seven or eight years and each time it’s been a failure and that’s not a surprise. Fiscal stimulus is not stimulating in and of itself.”

— Milton Friedman

264. “Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse – for both the addict and the rest of us.”

— Milton Friedman

265. “Germany cannot get out of the euro. What it has to do, therefore, is make the economy more flexible – to eliminate the restrictions on prices, on wages and on employment; in short, the regulations that keep 10 percent of the German workforce unemployed.”

— Milton Friedman

266. “Highway Congestion We all complain about highway congestion. That is interesting for a different reason. The private automobile industry is able to produce all the automobiles anybody wants to drive, but the government is apparently not able to produce a comparably adequate highway system, a clear contrast.”

— Milton Friedman

267. “The growing role that the government has played in financing and administering schooling has led not only the enormous waste of taxpayers money but also to a far poorer educational system.”

— Milton Friedman

268. “The state of our educational system is a disgrace to our country. We have an elementary and secondary school system in which close to half of the youngsters never graduate properly. It’s a disgrace that there is more illiteracy today than there was 100 years ago.”

— Milton Friedman

269. “You can travel from one end of the industrialized world to the other and almost the only people you will find engaging in backbreaking toil are people who are doing it for sport. To find people whose day’s toil has not been lightened by mechanical invention, you must go to the non-capitalist world.”

— Milton Friedman

270. “In the modern world, tariffs and similar restrictions on trade have been one source of friction among nations. But a far more troublesome source has been the far-reaching intervention of the state into the economy in such collectivist states as Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Franco’s Spain, and especially the communist countries, from Russia and its satellites to China.”

— Milton Friedman

271. “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

272. “Nor do the spokesmen for these organizations ever explain why, if the public school system is doing such a splendid job, it needs to fear competition from nongovernmental, competitive schools or, if it isn’t, why anyone should object to its “destruction.”

— Milton Friedman

273. “Here, too, we tend to be schizophrenic. We would all like to see government spending go down, provided it is not spending that benefits us. We would all like to see deficits reduced, provided it is through taxes imposed on others.”

— Milton Friedman

274. “What you have as a result of past policies is that German entrepreneurs go outside of Germany for many of their activities. They are investing abroad instead of at home because there isn’t the openness, fluidity and opportunity they find outside their borders.”

— Milton Friedman

275. “The true test of any scholar’s work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next twenty-five or fifty years. And the thing that I will really be proud of is if some of the work I have done is still cited in the text books long after I am gone.”

— Milton Friedman

276. “That is why, as Adam Smith put it, an individual who “intends only his own gain” is “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”

— Milton Friedman

277. “Everywhere, and at all times, economic progress has meant far more to the poor than to the rich.”

— Milton Friedman

278. “I believe the role that people like myself have played in the transformation of public opinion has been by persistently presenting a different point of view, a point of view which stresses the importance of private markets, of individual freedom, and the distorting effect of governmental policy.”

— Milton Friedman

279. “There is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits 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

280. “Self-interest is not myopic selfishness. It is whatever it is that interests the participants, whatever they value, whatever goals they pursue. The scientist seeking to advance the frontiers of his discipline, the missionary seeking to convert infidels to the true faith, the philanthropist seeking to bring comfort to the needy – all are pursuing their interests, as they see them, as they judge them by their own values.”

— Milton Friedman

281. “The collapse of communism in essence added tens and tens of millions of people to the world labor supply, and the people who were added had previously been getting very low income, but they were not unskilled. Many of them were fairly well educated.”

— Milton Friedman

282. “The argument for collectivism is simple; free market is not.”

— Milton Friedman

283. “Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that’s a different question. He’s always the special case. He ought to get special privileges from the government, a tariff, this, that and the other thing.”

— Milton Friedman

284. “I think in some ways it would make more sense to have as a poverty level a relative concept and say, the level of poverty is that level of income or that level of consumption below which 10 percent of the people now are.”

— Milton Friedman

285. “In which of these respects the public is more stubborn is an empirical question to be judged from the factual evidence, not something that can be determined by reason alone.”

— Milton Friedman

286. “On the contrary, the inflation itself is partly a response to the reaction. As it has become politically less attractive to vote higher taxes to pay for higher spending, legislators have resorted to financing spending through inflation, a hidden tax that can be imposed without having been voted, taxation without representation. That is no more popular in the twentieth century than it was in the eighteenth.”

— Milton Friedman

287. “The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power.”

— Milton Friedman

288. “The major way that society has come to agree on the rules of property is through the growth of common law, though more recently legislation has played an increasing role.”

— Milton Friedman

289. “There is a connection, and a close connection, for most unions most of the time. However, there are enough cases of union officials acting to benefit themselves at the expense of their members, both in legal ways and by misuse and misappropriation of union funds, to warn against the automatic equating of the interests of “labor unions” with the interests of “labor union members,” let alone with the interests of labor as a whole.”

— Milton Friedman

290. “I believe that the monetary stability is an absolutely critical element in the satisfactory operation of a system.”

— Milton Friedman

291. “I do not believe there is a natural resource economics. I believe there is good economics and bad economics.”

— Milton Friedman

292. “By relying primarily on voluntary co-operation and private enterprise, in both economic and other activities, we can insure that the private sector is a check on the powers of the governmental sector and an effective protection of freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought.”

— Milton Friedman

293. “No central banker would disagree with the proposition that inflation is primarily a monetary phenomenon. Not one of them will disagree that every inflation has been accompanied by a rapid increase in the quantity of money and every deflation by a decline in the quantity of money.”

— Milton Friedman

294. “To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a monetary union, putting out a fiat currency, composed of independent states.”

— Milton Friedman

295. “Personal freedom has grown greatly within China, and that will provoke ever more points of conflict between the individual and state.”

— Milton Friedman

296. “We regard the minimum wage rate as one of the most, if not the most, antiblack laws on the statute books. The government first provides schools in which many young people, disproportionately black, are educated so poorly that they do not have the skills that would enable them to get good wages. It then penalizes them a second time by preventing them from offering to work for low wages as a means of inducing employers to give them on-the-job training. All this is in the name of helping the poor.”

— Milton Friedman

297. “The nineteenth-century liberal regarded an extension of freedom as the most effective way to promote welfare and equality; the twentieth-century liberal regards welfare and equality as either prerequisites of or alternatives to freedom.”

— Milton Friedman

298. “It is ironic that the Great Depression was produced by government but was blamed on the private enterprise system. The Federal Reserve System explained in its 1933 annual report how much worse things would have been if the Federal Reserve had not behaved so well, yet the Federal Reserve was the chief culprit in making the depression as deep as it was. So the government produced the depression, the private enterprise system got blamed for it, and there was a tremendous change in attitudes.”

— Milton Friedman

299. “The most unresolved problem of the day is precisely the problem that concerned the founders of this nation: how to limit the scope and power of government. Tyranny, restrictions on human freedom, come primarily from governmental restrictions that we ourselves have set up.”

— Milton Friedman

300. “The Soviet experience was much worse than experts in the West had thought. That discovery had a tremendous impact both on the intellectual community and on the public at large.”

— Milton Friedman