Milton Friedman Quotes

While bringing about reforms and improving institutions, we have to be cautious that while shaking the tree to remove the bad fruit, we do not bring down the tree itself.

In most organizations, change comes in only two flavors: trivial and traumatic. Review the history of the average organization and you'll discover long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change.

Sometimes it's more difficult to achieve a 10% cost reduction than it is to tell people they have to achieve 50%. Small incremental steps block your view of doing something fundamentally different.

There is complete disdain for all that exists .... History, society, and the economics of present institutions are all minor issues in choosing a reform program ...

You have to be careful about reform. If you can't trust the system weren't bad shape.

Great institutions can only be reformed by stealth or by revolution.

He who desires or attempts to reform the government of a state, and wishes to have it accepted ... must at least retain the semblance of the old forms; so that it may seem to the people that there has been no change in the institutions, even though in fact they are entirely different from the old ones.

… evolution over revolution.

You get few chances to make really transformational institutional change.

We want traditional change—not transformational change.

Most governments and people want reform. It’s the prospect of change that makes reform rare.

Successful reform requires a long-term vision, driven by political leadership.

Reforms are not an end in itself. Reforms must have a concrete objective.

In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.

Until we start thinking in terms of revolution instead of compromise the Church will continue to pat itself on the back with token steps of renewal.

One person at a time, one company at a time.

Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force.

What we have got to do now is use this event, the resignation of the whole commission, to drive through root and branch reform.

The present system is unsustainable. The only question is whether we will master the change or it will master us.

For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions in the South, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire system, a revolution of values.

The current paradigm is so thoroughly established that the only way to change is to start over again.

I think that all human systems require continuous renewal. They rigidify. They get stuff in the joints. They forget what they cared about. The forces against it are nostalgia and the enormous appeal of having things the way they always have been, appeals to a supposedly happy past. But we've got to move on.

You need to have proper management if you're going to move forward.

Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

We have a choice. We can shape our future, or let events shape it for us. And if we want to succeed, we can't fall back on the stale debates and old divides that won't move us forward.