Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.
...theories should be judged by their ability to predict events rather than by the realism of their assumptions.
To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.
I believe that the monetary stability is an absolutely critical element in the satisfactory operation of a system.
The big problem for a democratic government - democrat with a small "d" - is how to hold down government spending.
Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems.
Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.
I would say that in this world, the greatest source of inequality has been special privileges granted by government.
Germany's problem, in part, is that it went into the euro at the wrong exchange rate that overvalued the deutsche mark.
I am convinced that the minimum-wage law is the most anti-Negro law on our statute books in its effect, not its intent.
The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.
History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
Money is a very powerful thing, which you hardly notice when it goes right, but which can create havoc when it goes wrong.
If China don't free up the political side, its economic growth will come to an end - while it is still at a very low level.
There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.
You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.
With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.
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?!
A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.
One of the reasons that I am in favor of less government is because when you have more government, industrialists take it over.
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.
To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a monetary union, putting out a fiat currency, composed of independent states.
Complete free trade is not politically feasible. Why? Because it's only in the general interest and in no one's special interest.
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.
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".
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.
Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
Personal freedom has grown greatly within China, and that will provoke ever more points of conflict between the individual and state.
In response to a suggestion that total free trade would end in cheaper foreign products flooding the market and causing unemployment.
I think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior.
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.
There are severe limits to the good that the government can do for the economy, but there are almost no limits to the harm it can do.
Americans know very little about social statistics, but I am not sure that it's important that Americans know about social statistics.
The fall of the Berlin Wall did more for the progress of freedom than all of the books written by myself or Friedrich Hayek or others.
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.
A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That's not a statement, it's a definition.
Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions.
Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters' own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.
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.
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.
The current oil crisis has not been produced by the oil companies. It is a result of governmental mismanagement exacerbated by the Mideast war.
There have been unions based on gold or silver, but not on fiat money - money tempted to inflate - put out by politically independent entities.
The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system.
No major institution in the US has so poor a record of performance over so long a period as the Federal Reserve, yet so high a public reputation.
The essential notion of a capitalist society ... is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.
How can thinking people believe that a government that cannot deliver the mail can deliver gas better than Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf, and the rest?
Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.