George Gilder

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Intelligent design itself does not have any content.
- George Gilder
Collection: Design
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The welfare culture tells the man he is not a necessary part of the family; he feels dispensable, his wife knows he is dispensable, his children sense it.
- George Gilder
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In embracing change, entrepreneurs ensure social and economic stability.
- George Gilder
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Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar; it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns.
- George Gilder
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This is what sexual liberation chiefly accomplishes - it liberates young women to pursue married men.
- George Gilder
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The differences between the sexes are the single most important fact of human society.
- George Gilder
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Real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind.
- George Gilder
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The first priority of any serious program against poverty is to strengthen the male role in poor families.
- George Gilder
Image of George Gilder
Activity and creativity almost always flow to the least regulated arena.
- George Gilder
Collection: Creativity
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Capitalism begins with giving.
- George Gilder
Collection: Giving
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A culture that does not aspire to the divine becomes obsessed with the fascination of evil, reveling in the frivolous, the depraved, and the bestial.
- George Gilder
Collection: Evil
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The key role of entrepreneurs, like the most crucial role of scientists, is not to fill in the gaps in an existing market or theory, but to generate entirely new markets or theories. . .They stand before a canvas as empty as any painter's; a page as blank as any poet's.
- George Gilder
Collection: Keys
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Creativity is the foundation of wealth. All progress comes from the creative minority. Under capitalism, wealth is less a stock of goods than a flow of ideas, the defining characteristic of which is surprise. If it were not surprising, we could plan it, and socialism would work.
- George Gilder
Collection: Creativity
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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.
- George Gilder
Collection: Successful
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The belief that all wealth comes from stealing is popular in prisons and at Harvard.
- George Gilder
Collection: Belief
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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.
- George Gilder
Collection: Males
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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.
- George Gilder
Collection: School
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Quality is abundant. Time is the new scarcity.
- George Gilder
Collection: Time
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[Successful] projects that entrepreneurs initiated and carried through had one essential quality. All had been thoroughly contemplated by the regnant experts and dominant companies, with their large research staffs and financial resources, and had been judged too difficult, untimely, risky, expensive and unprofitable.
- George Gilder
Collection: Successful
Image of George Gilder
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.
- George Gilder
Collection: Racism
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Capitalism offers nothing but frustrations and rebuffs to those who wish - because of claimed superiority of intelligence, birth, credentials, or ideals - to get without giving, to take without risking, to profit without sacrifice, to be exalted without humbling themselves to understand others and meet their needs.
- George Gilder
Collection: Sacrifice
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Hatred of producers of wealth still flourishes and has become, in fact, the racism of the intelligentsia.
- George Gilder
Collection: Racism
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Wealth usually comes from doing what other people find insufferably boring.
- George Gilder
Collection: People
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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
- George Gilder
Collection: Zero
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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.
- George Gilder
Collection: Real
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If government could create jobs and raise children, socialism would have worked.
- George Gilder
Collection: Jobs
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Most people consider themselves above the gritty and relentless details of life that allow the creation of great wealth. They leave it to the experts. But in general you join the one percent of the one percent not by leaving it to the experts but by creating new expertise, not by knowing what the experts know but by learning what they think is beneath them.
- George Gilder
Collection: Thinking
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Capitalists are motivated not chiefly by the desire to consume wealth or indulge their appetites, but by the freedom and power to consummate their entrepreneurial ideas.
- George Gilder
Collection: Inspirational
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People cannot be expected to learn one expertise and just apply it routinely in a job. Your expertise is in steadily renewing your knowledge base and extending it to new areas. That lifelong cycle of learning really is the foundation of the new information organization and economy.
- George Gilder
Collection: Jobs
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The United States is probably the most [socially] mobile society in the history of the world. The virtues that are most valuable in it are diligence, discipline, ambition, and a willingness to take risks. Education and credentials are most important in government; elsewhere most skills are learned on the job.
- George Gilder
Collection: Jobs
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The fact is there hasn't been a thrilling new erogenous zone discovered since de Sade.
- George Gilder
Collection: Facts
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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.
- George Gilder
Collection: Land
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This is what sexual liberation chiefly accomplishes-it liberates young women to pursue married men.
- George Gilder
Collection: Men
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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.
- George Gilder
Collection: Smart
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Entropy is Janus-faced. Its upside surprises are redemptive and favorable to freedom. It is freedom of choice. But the carrier itself requires constant vigilance against entropic noise. Order is not spontaneous, but it is a necessary condition for all the surprises of freedom and opportunity.
- George Gilder
Collection: Opportunity
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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.
- George Gilder
Collection: Order
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In an information economy, entrepreneurs master the science of information in order to overcome the laws of the purely physical sciences. They can succeed because of the surprising power of the laws of information, which are conducive to human creativity. The central concept of information theory is a measure of freedom of choice. The principle of matter, on the other hand, is not liberty but limitation- it has weight and occupies space.
- George Gilder
Collection: Creativity
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Some economists became obsessed with market efficiency and others with market failure. Generally held to be members of opposite schools-freshwater and saltwater, Chicago and Cambridge, liberal and conservative, Austrian and Keynesian-both sides share an essential economic vision. They see their discipline as successful insofar as it eliminates surprise-insofar, that is, as the inexorable workings of the machine override the initiatives of the human actors.
- George Gilder
Collection: School
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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.
- George Gilder
Collection: Real
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Poverty is less a matter of income than of prospects. While the incomes of the poor have steadily risen through Great Society largesse, their prospects have plummeted as families have broken into dependent fragments.
- George Gilder
Collection: Broken
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The crucial role of the rich in a capitalist economy is... to invest; to provide unencumbered and unbureaucratized cash.
- George Gilder
Collection: Capitalist Economy
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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.
- George Gilder
Collection: Intelligent
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Bandwidth grows at least three times faster than computer power.
- George Gilder
Collection: Three
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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.
- George Gilder
Collection: Creating
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Giving is the vital impulse and moral center of capitalism.
- George Gilder
Collection: Generosity
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Surely women's liberation is a most unpromising panacea. But the movement is working politically, because our sexuality is so confused, our masculinity so uncertain, and our families so beleaguered that no one knows what they are for or how they are sustained.
- George Gilder
Collection: Confused
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The information glut has become a ruling cliche. As all resources - from energy to information - become more abundant, the presure of economic scarcity falls ever more heavily on one key residual, and that single shortage looms ever more stringent and controlling. The governing scarcity of the information economy is time: the shards of a second, the hours in a day, the years in a life, the latency of memory, the delay in aluminum wires, the time to market, the time to metastasis, the time to retirement.
- George Gilder
Collection: Retirement
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All small returns are noise. To transcend the noise and the risk, seek outsized returns from technological paradigms.
- George Gilder
Collection: Risk
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In the history of enterprise, most of the protagonists of major new products and companies began their education
- George Gilder
Collection: Enterprise
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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.
- George Gilder
Collection: Unique