The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.
Milton Friedman

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
Milton Friedman

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
Milton Friedman

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
Milton Friedman

The black market was a way of getting around government controls. It was a way of enabling the free market to work. It was a way of opening up, enabling people.
Milton Friedman

The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes.
Milton Friedman

Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
Milton Friedman

Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
Milton Friedman

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency.
Douglas MacArthur

Which government is the best? The one that teaches us to govern ourselves.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Any government that supports, protects or harbours terrorists is complicit in the murder of the innocent and equally guilty of terrorist crimes.
George W. Bush

Government does not create wealth. The major role for the government is to create an environment where people take risks to expand the job rate in the United States.
George W. Bush

I know it's going to be the private sector that leads this country out of the current economic times we're in. You can spend your money better than the government can spend your money.
George W. Bush

A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
Alexis de Tocqueville

In other words, a democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
Alexis de Tocqueville

A President needs political understanding to run the government, but he may be elected without it.
Harry S. Truman

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.
Harry S. Truman

A politician is a man who understands government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for 15 years.
Harry S. Truman

When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.
Harry S. Truman