“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

What makes it [economics] most fascinating is that its fundamental principles are so simple that they can be written on one page, that anyone can understand them, and yet very few do.

The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximize its profits.

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.

Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.

Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters’ own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.

There is one and only one responsibility of business: to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.

Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

The essential notion of a capitalist society … is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.

You must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business.

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

The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.

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

The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power – we must have a dispersion of power.

Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That’s not a statement, it’s a definition.

It requires a certain kind of mind to see beauty in a hamburger bun.

Feed the poor and get rich or feed the rich and get poor.

I’ve read hundreds of cookbooks. Most of those cookbooks don’t even tell you how to get a steak ready, how to bake biscuits or an apple pie.

I was sixty-six years old. I still had to make a living. I looked at my social security check of 105 dollars and decided to use that to try to franchise my chicken recipe. Folks had always liked my chicken.

I went to a restaurant that serves ‘breakfast at any time’. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

Only hire people you want to have dinner with.

I got my computer. The great thing about the computer is that you only need enough money to buy a computer and some food, and you’re all right. I don’t have to go to premières.