Quotes from Milton Friedman

Humility is the distinguishing virtue of the believer in freedom; arrogance, of the paternalist.

Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power.

Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself…. Economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.

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.

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.

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.

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

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.

The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a, from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way.

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

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.

The power to do good is also the power to do harm.

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

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?

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.

A society that puts equality... ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.

History suggests that Capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom.

I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.

Most economic fallacies derive - from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

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.

Spending by government currently amounts to about 45 percent of national income. By that test, government owns 45 percent of the means of production that produce the national income. The U.S. is now 45 percent socialist.