I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.

Social justice rests on the hate towards those that enjoy a comfortable position, namely, upon envy.

It is also true that the less possible it becomes for a man to acquire a new fortune, the more must the existing fortunes appear as privileges for which there is no justification. Policy is then certain to aim at taking these fortunes out of private hands, either by the slow process of heavy taxation of inheritance or by the quicker one of outright confiscation. A system based on private property and control of the means of production presupposes that such property and control can be acquired by any successful man.

It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know.

You can have economic freedom without political freedom, but you cannot have political freedom without economic freedom.

Freedom necessarily means that many things will be done which we do not like.

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.