552 Quotes by Milton Friedman

Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.

Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today’s disadvantaged to become tomorrow’s privileged and, in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a fuller and richer life.

Now that I’m 60, every morning I look in the mirror and say, “I don’t know who you are, stranger, but I’m gonna shave you anyway”.

Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay.

The government has no more right to tell me what goes into my mouth, including illegal drugs, than it has to tell me what comes out of my mouth.

None of this means that government does not have a very real function. Indeed, the tragedy is that because government is doing so many things it ought not to be doing, it performs the functions it ought to be performing badly. The basic functions of government are to defend the nation against foreign enemies, to prevent coercion of some individuals by others within the country, to provide a means of deciding on our rules, and to adjudicate disputes.3.

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.

The central banks cannot control interest rates. That’s a mistake. They can control a particular rate, such as the Federal Funds rate, if they want to, but they can’t control interest rates.

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?