Milton Friedman Quotes

Governments and entire planets are important, Threepio. But when you sift everything down, they're all just made of people.

States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.

Mr. Speaker, we have reached a point in history where some have forgotten that it is the family, not the government, that is the fundamental building block of our society.

Sports are a microcosm of society.

The economy is much bigger than the market. We will not be able to build a good economy - nor a good society - unless we look at the vast expanse beyond the market.

Ours is a country built more on people than on territory.

The market is not an invention of capitalism …. It is an invention of civilization.

Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else

It is not possible to assume that a world carried on by division of labor and authority, can be governed by universal opinions in the whole population.

It is an ugly name, that of "The Masses," for the great majority of human beings in a nation.

Society is one word, but many things.

Don't you ever orget that in the end, our future is tied to people, that it's more about ideas than a tax.

One of the biggest lies in capitalism is that companies like competition. They don't. Nobody likes competition.

But now that foreign steel, and foreign cars, are moving into the United States in increased quantities at relatively low prices, the United States can no longer keep its business system fluid by inflation.

Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It's the most important thing that happens, and it's the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.

The world is getting very much more competitive.

We are a nation equally afraid of gathering together and being alone.

Family does not necessarily mean blood relatives but often a description of a community, organisation or nation.

We are nothing but by the law.

Of all the arts, music is the one communal art. It requires for its existence extensive cooperation and organization...Singing together the greatest choral music of all time is the surest way of developing in a community that sense of quality and reverence for beauty, which is the basis of a musical culture...Entertainment has its place in life just as candies and cocktails have, but health is not built on such a diet alone, nor culture exclusively on amusement.

There is such a thing as society. It's just not the same thing as the state.

Democracy is not a mere consequence, a certain stage in the development of society. It is the condition on which the survival of productive forces depends.

The arts can enrich all of us in this nation as individuals. The arts can enrich all of our communities and the country. And the arts can connect us to each other like nothing else can.

the crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock.

The People, though we think of a great entity when we use the word, means nothing more than so many millions of individual men.