Milton Friedman Quotes

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.

The world today is divided into the free and the enslaved.

Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.

Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party - though they are quite numerous - is no freedom at all.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

Let this circumstance of our constitution therefore be directed to this noble purpose, and then all the objections urged against it by jealous tyranny and affrighted superstition will vanish.

Systematic recourse to violence put forward as the necessary path to liberation has to be condemned as a destructive illusion and one that opens the way to new forms of servitude. One must condemn with equal vigor violence exercised by the powerful against the poor, arbitrary action by the police, and any form of violence established as a system of government.

To live by one man's will became the cause of all men's misery.

Our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep .... They are determined not to be free.

Advocating the expansion of the powers of the state is treason to mankind

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty

It requires an effort of logical acrobatics to believe that carnage of innocents is an instrument for freedom and elections are a symbol of deception and repression!

Beyond the barricades we long to see a Hong Kong free from tyranny and a puppet government.

There is no need to give in to the compromise that totalitarian regimes always count on.

A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. Neither are a people any the less slaves because permitted periodically to choose new masters.

History has a long-range perspective. It ultimately passes stern judgment on tyrants and vindicates those who fought, suffered, were imprisoned, and died for human freedom, against political oppression and economic slavery.

If dictatorship is the concentration of power, freedom consists in its diffusion.

It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free.

The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists.

I love the people of Venezuela. I want that country to have freedom. I want it to have human rights and to be banned by a dictator like Nicolas Maduro is, to me, a badge of honor.

In all sorts of government man is made to believe himself free, and to be in chains.

My face on every coin engraved, the anarchists are all enslaved. My flag is forever waved, by the grateful people I have saved.

The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.

There are cases where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him.

We look back, already, with astonishment, at the daring outrages committed by despotism, on the reason and rights of man; we look forward with joy, to the period, when it shall be despoiled of all its usurpations, and bound forever in the chains, with which it had loaded its miserable victims.