George Gilder
The prevailing theory of capitalism suffers from one central and disabling flaw, a profound distrust and incomprehension of capitalism.Collection: Profound
Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises.Collection: Surprise
Entrepreneurial creation is the generation, de novo, of novelty and surprise- freedom of choice originating in the world of ideas, and imagination beyond all concern with chemicals. The contrary view- that all ideas are determined by material relationships- is the materialist superstition.Collection: Views
The fundamental fact in the lives of the poor in most parts of America is that the wages of common labor are far below the benefits of AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, public defenders, leisure time and all the other goods and services of the welfare state.Collection: America
The key to growth is quite simple: creative men with money. The cause of stagnation is similarly clear: depriving creative individuals of financial power.Collection: Simple
A policy of subsidizing failures will end in an economy strewn with capital-guzzling industries long past their time of profitability - old companies that cannot create jobs themselves, but can stand in the way of job creation.Collection: Jobs
The envy of excellence leads to perdition; the love of it leads to the light.Collection: Light
The central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter. ...The powers of the mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.Collection: Mind
All progress comes from the creative minority.Collection: Creative
Liberals force lower middle-class families, who love their children, to dispatch them to ghetto schools dominated by gangs of fatherless boys bearing knives.Collection: Children
It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. As Henry Ford said many years earlier: "If I had listened to my customers, I would have built a faster horse." Inventions in general express Shannon entropy. They come from the supply side.Collection: Horse
History tells us that the threat to prosperity is not debt but socialism.Collection: Debt
[The] zero-sum caricature [applies] much more accurately to socialism, which stifles the creation of new wealth and thus fosters a dog-eat-dog struggle over existing material resources.Collection: Dog
The rates of taxation climb and the levels of capital decline, until the only remaining wealth beyond the reach of the regime is the very protein of human flesh, and that too is finally taxed, bound, and gagged, and brought to the colossal temple of the state - a final sacrifice of carnal revenue to feed the declining elite.Collection: Sacrifice
Nothing is more deadly to achievement than the belief that effort will not be rewarded, that the world is a bleak and discriminatory place in which only the predatory and the specially preferred can get ahead.Collection: Achievement
A design isn't finished until somebody is using it. Brenda Laurel Intelligent design itself does not have any content.Collection: Intelligent
In the history of enterprise, most of the protagonists of major new products and companies began their education - not in the classroom, where the old ways are taught, but in the factories and labs where new ways are wrought ... nothing has been so rare in recent years as an Ivy League graduate who has made a significant innovation in American enterprise.Collection: Years
Like the Pentagon, our social science often reduces all phenomena to dollars and body counts. Sexuality, family unity, kinship, masculine solidarity, maternity, motivation, nurturing, all the rituals of personal identity and development, all the bonds of community, seem "sexist," "superstitious," "mystical," "inefficient," "discriminatory." And, of course, they are -- and they are also indispensable to a civilized society.Collection: Motivation
Unlike an inexorable, Newtonian "great machine", the economy is not a closed system.Collection: Machines
Enforced by genetics, sexual reproduction, perspective, and experience, the most manifest characteristic of human beings is their diversity. The freer an economy is, the more this human diversity of knowledge will be manifested. By contrast, political power originates in top-down processes-governments, monopolies, regulators, and elite institutions- all attempting to quell human diversity and impose order. Thus power always seeks centralization.Collection: Government