A stable and democratic society is impossible without a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens and without widespread … - Milton Friedman

Unfortunately, the hardest thing for people to understand is that maybe if you leave things alone, it'll be better than stepping in and trying to do something.

Anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.

The two chief enemies of the free society or free enterprise are intellectuals on the one hand and businessmen on the other, for opposite reasons. Every intellectual believes in freedom for himself, but he's opposed to freedom for others. He thinks that the business world is different, that because of a chaos of competition and waste, there ought to be a central planning board that will establish social priorities. But he's horrified at the thought of having a central planning board to establish social priorities for writers and researchers. So the intellectuals favor freedom for themselves and oppose it for everybody else.

The businessmen are just the opposite — every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that's a different question. He's always the special case. He ought to get special privileges from the government, a tariff, this, that and the other thing. And it's this coalition that's really difficult for us so I think we ought to be careful of according businessmen too much power, or of believing that they are the major source of support for a free society.