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.
MILTON FRIEDMANBecause we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery.
More Milton Friedman Quotes
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The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.
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A free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.
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The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximize its profits.
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Anything that government can do, private enterprise can do for half the cost.
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I am a libertarian with a small “l” and a Republican with a capital “R”. And I am a Republican with a capital “R” on grounds of expediency, not on principle.
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I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.
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We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
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Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.
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When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.
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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.
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Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery.
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The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
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Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
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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.
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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.
MILTON FRIEDMAN