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A large part of what we think of as economic activity is designed to accomplish what high transaction costs would otherwise prevent or to reduce transaction costs so that individuals can negotiate freely and we can take advantage of that diffused knowledge of which Friedrich Hayek has told us.

— Ronald Coase

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Source: Nobel Memorial Prize Lecture, "The Institutional Structure of Production", in Essays on Economics and Economists (1994), p. 9
Source quality: Precise citation Points to a specific work with a page, chapter, date or similar locator, so you can look it up.

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What I have done is to show the importance for the working of the economic system of what may be termed the institutional structure of production.

The Institutional Structure of Production (1992)

I can't remember [of a good regulation]. Regulation of transport, regulation of agriculture—agriculture is a, zoning is z. You know, you go from a to z, they are all bad. There were so many studies, and the result was quite universal: The effects were bad.

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If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess.

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In my youth it was said that what was too silly to be said may be sung. In modern economics it may be put into mathematics.

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A firm consist of the system of relationships which comes into existence when the direction of resources is dependent on an entrepreneur.

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If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn't go and look at horses. They'd sit in their studies and say to themselves, "what would I do if I were a horse?"

American institutionalists were not theoretical but anti-theoretical.... Without a theory they had nothing to pass on except a mass of descriptive material waiting for a theory, or a fire.

Ronald H. Coase (1984)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ronald Coase (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.