Fagen Friedman Quotes

All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman. ~ George Stigler

You have control over three things - what you think, what you say, and how you behave. To make a change in your life, you must recognize that these gifts are the most powerful tools you possess in shaping the form of your life. ~ Sonia Friedman

I do not believe there is a natural resource economics. I believe there is good economics and bad economics. ~ Milton Friedman

I don't think I have even achieved fame. Of course, Hemingway says that fame is death's little sister. ~ Kinky Friedman

This ain't no cloud, folks! And so, instead of calling this new creative energy source "the cloud," this book will henceforth use the term that Craig Mundie, the computer designer from Microsoft, once suggested. I will call it "the supernova" - a computational supernova. The ~ Thomas L. Friedman

Whatever you may be thinking when you apply for a job today, you can be sure the employer is asking this: Can this person add value every hour, every day - more than a worker in India, a robot or a computer? Can he or she help my company adapt by not only doing the job today but also reinventing the job for tomorrow? ~ Thomas Friedman

Fundamentally, there are only two ways of co-ordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion - the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary co-operation of individuals - the technique of the market place. ~ Milton Friedman

Due to some incident, real or manufactured, Russians in a Baltic capital begin demonstrating, police use tear gas, and somewhere violence breaks out and Russians are killed. The Russian government demands the right to protect its citizens, the Baltic country rejects the demand. Violence mounts, and the Russians demand that NATO stop the fighting. The Baltic state insists it is an internal matter, claims that Russian intelligence caused the violence, and demands that Russian intelligence stop its intervention. A series of explosions kill a large number of Russians, and Russia occupies the country. For ~ George Friedman

The invisible hand in politics operates in the opposite direction to the invisible hand in the market. ~ Milton Friedman

We're first on executions. We're 49th in funding public education. We're in a race with Mississippi for the bottom, and we're winning. ~ Kinky Friedman

I admit to drinking it, but I did not swallow. ~ Kinky Friedman

Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp. ~ Milton Friedman

Lord knows there's a lot of bad news in the world today to get you down, but there is one big thing happening that leaves me incredibly hopeful about the future, and that is the budding revolution in global online higher education. ~ Thomas Friedman

How youMore people will learn about IBM from Wikipedia in the coming years than from IBM itself. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

That summer, maybe for the first time in my life, I existed wholly in the present moment, which is one of the liberating things about traveling to a place where no one knows you. I had no past or future, which suited me perfectly, since I did not wish to reckon with either. ~ Rachel Friedman

We don't think of ourselves as being perfectionists, really. To us it's more about desperately trying to have it sound more or less OK. ~ Donald Fagen

Government spends somebody else's money on somebody else. ~ Milton Friedman

The political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who wrote a classic book in 1996 on why the most successful states and societies exhibit high levels of trust - Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity - noted that "social capital is a capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of it. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintainence of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing and it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind. It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in to do something about them you not only may make them worse, you will spread your tenticles and get bad results elsewhere. ~ Milton Friedman

We have to be the best global citizens we can be. ~ Thomas Friedman

What is al Qaeda? It's an open source religious political movement that works off the global supply chain. ~ Thomas Friedman

Italy spills over to everything. Italy is a huge banking system. It has been the major banking system in Eastern Europe. It's worked with Austria's banking system. There's all sorts of interplays there. So it's not the PIIGS one should worry about. Germany hasn't even begun falling yet. And when Germany falls, and it will, that's when the panic begins to set in. ~ George Friedman

I said that more people in more places can now compete, connect and collaborate with equal power and equal tools than ever before. ~ Thomas Friedman

No low-trust society will ever produce sustained innovation. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

A common objection to totalitarian societies is that they regard the end as justifying the means. Taken literally, this objection is clearly illogical. If the end does not justify the means, what does? But this easy answer does not dispose of the objection; it simply shows that the objection is not well put. To deny that the end justifies the means is indirectly to assert that the end in question is not the ultimate end, that the ultimate end is itself the use of the proper means. Desirable or not, any end that can be attained only by the use of bad means must give way to the more basic end of the use of acceptable means. ~ Milton Friedman

Average is officially over. When I graduated from college I got to find a job; my girls have to invent theirs. I attended college to learn skills for life, and lifelong learning for me afterward was a hobby. My girls went to college to learn the skills that could garner them their first job, and lifelong learning for them is a necessity for every job thereafter. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

The harm done by the FDA does not result from defects in the people in charge - unless it be a defect to be human. Many have been able and devoted civil servants. However, social, political, and economic pressures determine the behavior of the people supposedly in charge of a government agency to a far greater extent than they determine its behavior. No doubt there are exceptions, but they are rare - almost as rare as barking cats. That does not mean that effective reform is impossible. But it requires taking account of the political laws governing the behavior of government agencies, not simply berating officials for inefficiency and waste or questioning their motives and urging them to do better. The ~ Milton Friedman

Success based on anything but internal fulfillment is bound to be empty. ~ Martha Friedman

They greatly respected scholarship in itself, but they also impressed upon us that there were great opportunities available for those who were well educated. I received my primary and secondary education in Chicago. ~ Jerome Isaac Friedman

Supply chains cannot tolerate even 24 hours of disruption. So if you lose your place in the supply chain because of wild behavior you could lose a lot. It would be like pouring cement down one of your oil wells. ~ Thomas Friedman

Minimum wage increases. The Nobel Prize economist Milton Friedman has observed that the minimum wage is "one of the most ... anti-black laws on the statute books" because it destroys entry level jobs for second paycheck earners, teens, and other unskilled workers. ~ David Horowitz

Children are responsible individuals in embryo. They have ultimate rights of their own and are not simply the playthings of their parents. ~ Milton Friedman

There is no other complex field in our society in which do-it-yourself beats out factory production or market production. Nobody makes his or her own car. But it is still the case that parents can perform the job of educating their children [homeschooling], in many cases better than our present education system. ~ Milton Friedman

On another level compulsion would change matters drastically: the kind of society that would emerge if such acts of redistribution were voluntary is altogether different - and, by our standards, infinitely preferable - to the kind that would emerge if redistribution were compulsory. ~ Milton Friedman

column writing is an act of chemistry - precisely because you must conjure it up yourself. A column doesn't write itself the way a breaking news story does. A column has to be created. This act of chemistry usually involves mixing three basic ingredients: your own values, priorities, and aspirations; how you think the biggest forces, the world's biggest gears and pulleys, are shaping events; and what you've learned about people and culture - how they react or don't - when the big forces impact them. When ~ Thomas L. Friedman

You never have real changes unless you have a time of crisis. ~ Milton Friedman

Nature is regulating our climate for free. Mother Nature, she's been doing that for free, for a long, long time. Now do you really want to get in there and do geo-engineering and all this kind of stuff? ~ Thomas Friedman

I am hardly a technophobe. But we will get the best of these technologies only if we don't let them distract us from making these deep human connections, addressing these deep human longings, and inspiring these deep human energies. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

Suburban sprawl has heavily damaged the balance of our cities, divorcing environmental context from design and removing the concept of scale from the creation of neighborhoods. ~ Avi Friedman

I think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior. ~ Milton Friedman

You never marry the person you first see 'Casablanca' with. ~ Kinky Friedman

The child-teacher relationship is crucial. ~ Kinky Friedman