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

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

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

My interests were aroused, and my faith in the cliches of the subject destroyed, as so often with other subjects, by the discussions with my friend, Aaron Director.

The delicate and intricate pattern of competition and cooperation in the economic behavior of the hundreds of thousands of citizens of Stockholm offers a challenge to the economist that is perhaps as complex as the challenges of the physicist and the chemist.

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

The Chicago Economics Department was in intellectual ferment, although the central issues of the 1930s were very different from those in later times. I had never before encountered minds of that quality at close quarters and they influenced me strongly.

There is only one social science and we are its practitioners

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

My teaching began in 1936 at Iowa State College where T. W. Schultz was the department chairman.

And yet I would not freely exchange my science for those of my fellow laureates. They are forever confined in their professional discussions to the small numbers of their fellow scientists.

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

I started working and publishing in price theory by 1938.

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 through he just gets up, walks up to the podium, socks the mother****er right in the face and takes a piss all over his lecture notes.

In 1958, I came to Chicago where I have remained.