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Milton Friedman

165 quotes

• “If we are to use effectively these abstract models and this descriptive material, we must have a comparable exploration of the criteria for determining what abstract model it is best to use for particular kinds of problems, what entities in the abstract model are to be identified with what observable entities, and what features of the problem or of the circumstances have the greatest effect on the accuracy of the predictions yielded by a particular model or theory.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Methodology of Positive Economics" (1953)

• “The construction of hypotheses is a creative act of inspiration, intuition, invention; its essence is the vision of something new in familiar material. The process must be discussed in psychological, not logical, categories; studied in autobiographies and biographies, not treatises on scientific method; and promoted by maxim and example, not syllogism or theorem.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Methodology of Positive Economics" (1953)

• “Over the period covered by these data, a drastic change has occurred in the responsibilities undertaken by the state to provide assistance to the aged, unemployed and otherwise dependent. This change has had divergent results on the particular data under discussion. The availability of assistance from the state would clearly tend to reduce the need for private reserves and so to reduce private saving—it is equivalent, in terms of our hypothesis, to a reduction in the variance of transitory components.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: A Theory of the Consumption Function (1957)

• “I have no right to coerce someone else, because I cannot be sure that I'm right and he is wrong.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Say 'No' to Intolerance", Liberty magazine, vol. 4, no. 6, (July 1991) pp. 17-20.

• “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output. … A steady rate of monetary growth at a moderate level can provide a framework under which a country can have little inflation and much growth. It will not produce perfect stability; it will not produce heaven on earth; but it can make an important contribution to a stable economic society.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Counter-Revolution in Monetary Theory (1970) <!-- ([[w:Institute of Economic Affairs

• “Make politics an avocation, not a vocation.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in “Milton Friedman: A Tribute”, David R. Henderson, antiwar.com, (Nov. 20, 2006), told to Henderson (May, 1970)

• “There was nothing in these views to repel a student; or to make Keynes attractive. Keynes had nothing to offer those of us who had sat at the feet of Simons, Mints, Knight, and Viner.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Milton Friedman, "Comments on the Critics", Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 80, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 1972)

• “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 (1912–2006) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Interview "Milton Friedman Responds" in Chemtech (February 1974) p. 72.

• “The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power - we must have a dispersion of power.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Adapted from "Monetary Correction: A Proposal for Escalator Clauses to Reduce the Costs of Ending Inflation" (July 1974), see also AEI round table, July 1974.

• “I think the government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem and very often makes the problem worse.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: An Economist's Protest (1975), p. 6; often quoted as "The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

• “I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintenance of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing and it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind. It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in to do something about them you not only may make them worse, you will spread your tentacles and get bad results elsewhere.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Interview with on The Open Mind (7 December 1975)

• “I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Interview with on The Open Mind (7 December 1975)

• “If we have system in which government is in a position to give large favor - it's human nature to try to get this favor - whether those people are large enterprises, or whether they're small businesses like farmers, or whether they're representatives of any other special group. The only way to prevent that is to force them to engage in competition one with the other.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Interview with Richard Heffner on The Open Mind (7 December 1975)

• “In this day and age, we need to revise the old saying to read, "Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Bureaucracy Scorned" in Newsweek (29 December 1975), later published in Bright Promises, Dismal Performance : An Economist's Protest (1983)

• “The elementary truth is that the Great Depression was produced by government mismanagement. It was not produced by the failure of private enterprise, it was produced by the failure of government to perform a function which had been assigned to it.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Economic Myths and Public Opinion” The Alternative: An American Spectator vol. 9, no. 4, (January 1976) pp. 5-9, Reprinted in Bright Promises, Dismal Performance: An Economist’s Protest, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanov…

• “It's nice to elect the right people, but that isn't the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: About changing congress (c. 1977)

• “The great enemy of human freedom is the Government. By taking money out of our pockets and spending it, it destroys our freedom.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The National Times, Australia, (March 1, 1977)

• “The reality is that if you look at every program that the government has adopted in the direction of extending its scope, it took an enormous propaganda campaign by special propaganda groups to get those measures passed. There was no underlining public demand for those measures. On the contrary, the demand had to be created, it had to be developed, it had to be produced. And it was created, it was developed, it was produced, by people… who sincerely wanted to see an expansion in the scope of government.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Milton Friedman Speaks - Myths That Conceal Reality” (1977)

• “Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending, because that is the true tax. Every budget is balanced. There is no such thing as an unbalanced federal budget. You're paying for it. If you're not paying for it in the form of explicit taxes, you're paying for it indirectly in the form of inflation or in the form of borrowing. The thing that you keep your eye on is what government spends. And the real problem is to hold down government spending as a fraction of our income. And if you do that, you can stop worrying about the deficit.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech at San Diego Chamber of Commerce, excerpt (1978)

• “In my opinion, a society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty. A society that aims first for liberty will not end up with equality, but it will end up with a closer approach to equality than any other kind of system that has ever been developed.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Milton Friedman Speaks: The Role of Government in a Free Society ” (1978)

• “You can only aim at equality by giving some people the right to take things from others. And what ultimately happens when you aim for equality is that A and B decide what C should do for D, except that they take a bit of commission off on the way.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Milton Friedman Speaks: The Role of Government in a Free Society ” (1978)

• “[A] society which is socialist cannot also be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy: A Symposium" (1 April 1978), edited by William Barrett, Commentary

• “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.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The strongest argument for free enterprise is that it prevents anybody from having too much power. Whether that person is a government official, a trade union official, or a business executive. If forces them to put up or shut up. They either have to deliver the goods, produce something that people are willing to pay for, are willing to buy, or else they have to go into a different business.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: From The Tyranny of Control, an episode of the PBS Free to Choose television series (1980, vol. 2 transcript)

• “Society doesn't have values. People have values.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: From Created Equal, an episode of the PBS Free to Choose television series (1980, vol. 5 transcript).

• “The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: From Created Equal, an episode of the PBS Free to Choose television series (1980, vol. 5 transcript).

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

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: From Who protects the consumer?, an episode of the PBS Free to Choose television series (1980, vol. 7 transcript)

• “Governments never learn. Only people learn.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Statement made in 1980, as quoted in The Cynic's Lexicon : A Dictionary Of Amoral Advice‎ (1984), by Jonathon Green, p. 77

• “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Tyranny of the Status Quo, San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1980) p. 115

• “Will we read next that government control of prices has created a shortage of sand in the Sahara?”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Things That Ain’t So by Milton Friedman”, Newsweek (March 10, 1980) p. 79

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

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Lecture "The Suicidal Impulse of the Business Community" (1983); cited in Filters Against Folly (1985) by Garrett Hardin

• “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 (1912–2006) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Lecture "The Suicidal Impulse of the Business Community" (1983); cited in Filters Against Folly (1985) by Garrett Hardin

• “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.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: An Open Letter to Bill Bennett" in The Wall Street Journal (7 September 1989)

• “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.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Article "We Have Socialism, Q.E.D." in The New York Times (31 December 1989)

• “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 (1912–2006) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Interview with Milton Friedman”, David Levy, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (June 1, 1992)

• “The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Why Government Is the Problem" (February 1, 1993), p. 19

• “After the fall of communism, everybody in the world agreed that socialism was a failure. Everybody in the world, more or less, agreed that capitalism was a success. And every capitalist country in the world apparently deduced from that what the West needed was more socialism.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Milton Friedman: The Rise of Socialism is Absurd and There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch, Grand opening speech at Cato Institutes’ headquarters in Washington, D.C. (May 1993)

• “Thank heaven that we don’t get all of the government that we are made to pay for.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Quoted in the House of Lords, (Nov. 24, 1994), also in Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotes, Third Edition, Elizabeth Knowles, edit., Oxford University Press (2007) p. 124

• “I know of no severe depression, in any country or any time, that was not accompanied by a sharp decline in the stock of money and equally of no sharp decline in the stock of money that was not accompanied by a severe depression.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in The Money Masters (1995)

• “Joan Robinson, a leading Keynesian and radical, produced a specimen for me to analyze. I said something like, "This is obviously the writing of a foreigner, so it's difficult for me to analyze. But I would say it is written by someone who had considerable artistic but not much intellectual talent." It turned out to be the handwriting of Lydia Lopokova, the world-famous Russian ballerina whom Keynes had married. That was surely my greatest triumph of the year at Cambridge!”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Interview (10 February 1999) in the video production Take It To The Limits: Milton Friedman on Libertarianism.

• “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 (1912–2006) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Interview with Brian Lamb, In Depth Book TV (2000)

• “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 (1912–2006) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: PBS “Interview: On freedom and free markets” Commanding Heights series (Oct. 1, 2000)

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

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: PBS “Interview: On freedom and free markets” Commanding Heights series (Oct. 1, 2000)

• “The Chilean economy did very well, but more important, in the end the central government, the military junta, was replaced by a democratic society. So the really important thing about the Chilean business is that free markets did work their way in bringing about a free society.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Commanding Heights, Interview on PBS”, (Oct. 1, 2000)

• “I think it is only because capitalism has proved so enormously more efficient than alternative methods that it has survived at all. (...) I'm not sure capitalism is the right word. There is a sense in which every society is capitalist. The Soviet Union was capitalist, but it was state capitalism. Latin American societies in the past have been capitalist, but it has been oligarchic capitalism. So what we really need to talk about is not capitalism but free market or competitive capitalism which is the system that we would like to have adopted, not just capitalism.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Interview with Parker in Randall E. Parker(ed.), Reflections on the Great Depression (2002)

• “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 (1912–2006) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Financial Times [UK] (7 June 2003)

• “I am a libertarian with a small "l" and a Republican with a capital "R". And I am a Republican with a capital "R" on grounds of expediency, not on principle.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Charlie Rose Show (November 2005)

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