Milton Friedman

"Capitalism requires both free markets and the rule of law."

"The fatal conceit is that government officials know what is best for the people."

"Markets reward virtue and punish vice through the mechanism of profit and loss."

"The expansion of government is the contraction of human freedom."

"Price is the signal that conveys information through the market system."

"The role of money is to facilitate exchange not to direct the economy."

"When government tries to do too much it ends up doing everything badly."

"Freedom requires both negative liberty and the rule of law."

"The greatest threat to progress is the assumption that we already understand how things work."

"Prosperity comes from voluntary exchange not from government mandates."

"The market is a powerful teacher that punishes mistakes more effectively than any regulator."

"The most important change in the Chinese economy over the past decade has been the movement toward more market-oriented policies and less government control."

"Prices are important not because money is dear to us but because they convey information about the relative scarcity of goods."

"The great achievements of civilization have not come from government mandates or planning. They've come from the private activities of citizens who felt free to pursue their own interests."

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

"The most important thing is that the rules be known in advance and that they be followed."

"Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation."

"Competition is a condition precedent for freedom. It is the only effective guarantee against exploitation."

"The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom."

"If we want to inspire our children to reach for their dreams, we must inspire them with the belief that they can achieve anything if they work hard enough."

"The greatest advances in human welfare have not come from compassion or pity but from enlightened self-interest."

"You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state."

"Fundamentalism of any kind is rooted in the belief that the world is too complicated for interpretation."

"Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the mistakes of the last generation of political work."

"The most important issue is not whether you believe in redistribution, but whether you believe in freedom."

"Prices perform the function of coordinating the separate actions of different people in the same way that a dancer coordinates the movements of their limbs."

"We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes non-work."

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

"The drive for equality of outcome requires ever-increasing levels of state intervention and control."

"Money is a mechanism for transmitting information, not a cause of anything."