Milton Friedman

"The test of any society is not how it treats the rich and famous, but how it treats the poor and unknown."

"We have a choice between a free society and an authoritarian one."

"The beauty of the free market is that it rewards merit, not connections."

"Patience in the pursuit of freedom is patience in the pursuit of justice."

"The greatest gift you can give your children is the freedom to make their own mistakes."

"Hope is not a strategy; freedom is."

"The persistence of poverty is not due to lack of wealth but to lack of freedom to create it."

"The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the less developed countries won't be direct but indirect, through revolution."

"Prices are important not because money is dear to us but because they transmit information."

"Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one man's gain is another's loss."

"We economists have never been able to agree on the causes of the Great Depression."

"The greatest advances of civilization have not come from government mandates but from the voluntary actions of individuals."

"Prices perform the coordination function in a free market that a planning board performs in a centrally planned economy."

"There is no such thing as a free lunch, and there's no such thing as painless economic adjustment."

"The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm."

"A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither."

"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."

"Inflation is caused by a sharp increase in the quantity of money relative to output."

"I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn't have a slant."

"Fundamentally, there are only two ways of co-ordinating the economic activities of millions: central direction involving the use of coercion, or voluntary co-operation of individuals."

"You cannot be sure you're right unless you understand the arguments against your position."

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."

"Monopoly is a result of government intervention, not a result of the free market."

"The most important thing is that we economists understand that we are not very good at what we do."

"Fair weather liberals want to redistribute wealth when times are good but disappear when sacrifice is needed."

"The preservation of the individual's freedom is incompatible with the supremacy of the state."

"Economists may not know how to run the economy, but they know how to make trouble if you don't listen to them."

"Regulation of money should be by rules rather than by discretionary action of authorities."

"The role of government is to protect property rights and enforce contracts, nothing more and nothing less."

"We are all libertarians on some issues and conservatives on others."