George Gilder Quotes
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Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises.
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When capitalists are thwarted, deflected, or dispossessed, the generals and politicians,... and socialist intellectuals, are always amazed at how quickly the great physical means of production - the contested tokens of wealth and resources of nature - dissolve into so much scrap, ruined concrete, snarled wire, and wilderness.
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The crucial role of the rich in a capitalist economy is... to invest; to provide unencumbered and unbureaucratized cash.
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The analogy between Shannon and codes in biology isn't something that sprang from my belief in God... except maybe on some deeper or more transcendent level.
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Unlike femininity, relaxed masculinity is at bottom empty, a limp nullity. While the female body is full of internal potentiality, the male is internally barren. Manhood at the most basic level can be validated and expressed only in action.
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In the history of enterprise, most of the protagonists of major new products and companies began their education
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Entrepreneurial knowledge has little to do with certified expertise, advanced degrees, or the learning of establishment schools. The fashionably educated and cultivated spurn the kind of fanatically focused learning commanded by the innovators. Wealth all too often comes from doing what other people consider insufferably boring or unendurably hard.
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On every continent and in every epoch the peoples who have excelled in creating wealth have been the victims of some of society's greatest brutalities.
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But if the 1 percent and the 0.1 percent are respected and allowed to risk their wealth - and new rebels are allowed to rise up and challenge them - America will continue to be the land where the last regularly become the first by serving others.
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By merely foreswearing violence and taking advantage of their unique position contiguous with the world’s most creative people, the Palestinians could be rich and happy.
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What's being pushed is to have Darwinism critiqued, to teach there's a controversy. Intelligent design itself does not have any content.
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At the heart of capitalism is the unification of knowledge and power. As Friedrich Hayek, the leader of the Austrian school of economics, put it, "To assume all the knowledge to be given to a single mind... is to disregard everything that is important and significant in the real world." Because knowledge is dispersed, power must be as well.
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Giving is the vital impulse and moral center of capitalism.
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The envy of excellence leads to perdition; the love of it leads to the light.
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A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge
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A successful economy depends on the proliferation of the rich, on creating a large class of risk-taking men who are willing to shun the easy channels of a comfortable life in order to create new enterprise, win huge profits, and invest them again.
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In a world of dumb terminals and telephones, networks had to be smart. But in a world of smart terminals, networks have to be dumb.
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Socialism is an insurance policy bought by all the members of a national economy to shield them from risk. But the result is to shield them from knowledge of the real dangers and opportunities.
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Hatred of producers of wealth still flourishes and has become, in fact, the racism of the intelligentsia.
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Wealth usually comes from doing what other people find insufferably boring.
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Intelligent design itself does not have any content.
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Futurists falter because they belittle the power of religious paradigms, deeming them either too literal or too fantastic.
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Welfare now erodes work and family and thus keeps poor people poor. Accompanying welfare is an ideology - sustaining a whole system of federal and state bureaucracies - that also operates to destroy their faith. The ideology takes the form of false theories of discrimination and spurious claims of racism and sexism as the dominant forces in the lives of the poor.
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From the equilibrium and spontaneous order of Adam Smith and his heirs, from invisible-handed markets and perfect competition, supply and demand, and rewards and punishments, I was pushed to theories of disequilibrium and disorder, and information and noise, as the keys to understanding economic progress.