It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.
Banking may well be a career from which no man really recovers.
Preservationists are the only people in the world who are invariably confirmed in their wisdom after the fact.
When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover.
Agreeable as it is to know where one is proceeding, it is far more important to know where one has arrived.
The overall effect of the rise of the industrial system is greatly to reduce the union as a social force. But it will not disappear or become entirely unimportant.
But it can be laid down as a rule that those who speak most of liberty are least inclined to use it.
There is wonder and a certain wicked pleasure in these giddy ascents and terrible falls, especially as they happen to other people.
It’s a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.
Conscience is better served by a myth.
If inheritance qualifies one for office, intelligence cannot be a requirement.
The present age of contentment will come to an end only when and if the adverse developments that it fosters challenge the sense of comfortable well-being.
Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.
I never enjoyed writing a book more; indeed, it is the only one I remember in no sense as a labor but as a joy.
No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean.
In the affluent society, no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessities.
Private enterprise did not get us atomic energy.
Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.
That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplification of our culture.
A nuclear war does not defend a country and it does not defend a system. I’ve put it the same way many times; not even the most accomplished ideologue will be able to tell the difference between the ashes of capitalism and the ashes of communism.