Adam Smith had one overwhelmingly important triumph: he put into the center of economics the systematic analysis of the behavior of individuals pursu….

The main insight learned from interdisciplinary studies is the return to specialization.

Even before I came to Chicago, I had gotten interested in the existence of dispersion of prices under conditions which economic theory said would yie….

Friedman stumbled in, late to the seminar as usual and reeking of cigar smoke and whiskey. He hadn't read the paper being presented, and halfway thro….

Competition is a tough weed, not a delicate flower..

Stigler's Law: No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer..

There is only one social science and we are its practitioners.

The Chicago Economics Department was in intellectual ferment, although the central issues of the 1930s were very different from those in later times.….

Henry Ford made a lot of money making cars at one time, but that was a small advantage to him compared to the benefit to millions of people who for t….

My main graduate training was received at the University of Chicago from which I received the Ph.D. in 1938..

Why, when the economist gives advice to his society, is he so often cooly ignored? He never ceases to preach free trade, and protectionism is growing….

I recall my mother asking in about 1946 what I was and I replied proudly that I was a professor. A decade later she repeated her question and I repea….

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

That subject has lost its one time appeal to economists as our science has become more abstract, but my interest has even grown more intense as the q….

A Swedish physicist can not discuss his work with fifty people unless he goes abroad. A Swedish economist can get opinions and instructions in his na….

Mathematics has no symbols for confused ideas..

...the number of saintly men has not yet risen to the level where the census makes them a separate statistical category..

I attended schools in Seattle through the University of Washington, from which I was graduated in 1931. I spent the next year at Northwestern Univers….

It was in the 1960s that I began the detailed study of public regulation..

If you never miss a plane, you’re spending too much time at the airport..

I met my wife, Margaret L. Mack, at the University of Chicago. We were married in 1936. She died in 1970..