Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.

Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.

I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or it they try, they will shortly be out of office.

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.

A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.

George Stigler was a delightful correspondent. In a letter from London in 1948, after remarking on the inconvertibility of the pound and the inedible, still-rationed food, he concluded, "So here I am losing weight and gaining pounds.