Milton Friedman Quotes

Our system works best if the value of money stays the same.

I believe that the monetary stability is an absolutely critical element in the satisfactory operation of a system.

The job of the Central Bank is to worry.

The human species was not born into a market economy. Bees won't sell you honey if you offer them an electronic funds transfer. The human species imagined money into existence, and it exists - for us, not mice or wasps - because we go on believing in it.

The participation of our country in the eurozone is a guarantee for the country's monetary stability. It is a driver of financial prosperity.

The first requisite of a sound monetary system is that it put the least possible power over the quantity or quality of money in the hands of the politicians.

Our focus is on ensuring America has the strongest economy in the world for the next 100 years and to do that, we need to get to the role of the Federal Reserve and we need to get it right.

It has a sound and rational circulating medium, a real and definite representative of wealth.

Our dollar is now altogether too greatly influenced by the accidents of international trade, by the internal policies of other nations and by political disturbance in other continents. Therefore the United States must take firmly in its own hands the control of the gold value of our dollar. This is necessary in order to prevent dollar disturbances from swinging us away from our ultimate goal.

Nothing is more vital to our supremacy as a nation and to the beneficent purposes of our Government than a sound and stable currency.

The most important quality of a currency is its stability.

The Federal Reserve Board is indefensible in theory and indispensable in practice.

it is obvious that there is only wanting to the fiscal prosperity of the Government the restoration of an uniform medium of exchange … it is essential that the nation should possess a currency of equal value, credit, and use wherever it may circulate. The Constitution has entrusted Congress exclusively with the power of creating and regulating a currency

Monetary stability is a cornerstone of the social contract.

Requiring the Fed to focus on preserving the purchasing power of the dollar will create a solid foundation for economic growth.

What is important for a central banker is that you have to convey that you know what you are doing.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the debate about monetary policy and the nation's financial system had been going on for over a century. Increasingly, the shortcomings of the existing system were causing too much harm to ignore.

The Federal Reserve is incapable of accomplishing its stated objectives.

Money is just paper that gets us through life.

That paper money has some advantages is admitted. But that its abuses also are inevitable and, by breaking up the measure of value, makes a lottery of all private property, cannot be denied.

Like it or not, we have to have a financial system that is healthy and functioning.

The market economy needs no apologists and propagandists. It can apply to itself the words of Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph in St. Paul's: 'If you seek his monument, look around.'

Wherever there's capitalism there's this inclination toward simplicity. There's also a human need to process complicated things by turning them into something else.

You can't have a healthy economy without sound money, which is why we're on the verge of very serious economic problem.

Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in a free and open society. Marxism expects this society to result from the abolition of private profit. Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior.