Quotes from Milton Friedman

In a bureaucratic system, useless work drives out useful work.

The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years.

You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.

The argument for the free market is a complicated and sophisticated one and depends on demonstration of secondary effects. I have confidence market efficiency will win out.

The argument for collectivism is simple; free market is not.

There is one and only one responsibility of business: to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.

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

There is only one social responsibility of business

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.

They think that the cure to big government is to have bigger government... the only effective cure is to reduce the scope of government - get government out of the business.

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...

If freedom were not so economically efficient it certainly wouldn't stand a chance.

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.

And what does reward virtue? You think the communist commissar rewards virtue? You think a Hitler rewards virtue? You think, excuse me, if you'll pardon me, American presidents reward virtue? Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their political clout?

Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.

We don't have a desperate need to grow. We have a desperate desire to grow.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

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