Top 74 Quotes & Sayings by George Gilder

Real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind.

This is what sexual liberation chiefly accomplishes - it liberates young women to pursue married men.

The first priority of any serious program against poverty is to strengthen the male role in poor families.

Intelligent design itself does not have any content.

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.

The differences between the sexes are the single most important fact of human society.

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.

In embracing change, entrepreneurs ensure social and economic stability.

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.

[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.

If government could create jobs and raise children, socialism would have worked.

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.

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.

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.

Unlike an inexorable, Newtonian "great machine", the economy is not a closed system.

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

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.

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.

Activity and creativity almost always flow to the least regulated arena.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The most important feature of an information economy, in which information is defined as surprise, is the overthrow, not the attainment, of equilibrium. The science that we have come to know as information theory establishes the supremacy of the entrepreneur because it appreciates the powerful connection between destruction and what Schumpeter described as "creative destruction," between chaos and creativity.

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.

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.

Hatred of producers of wealth still flourishes and has become, in fact, the racism of the intelligentsia.

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.

The belief that all wealth comes from stealing is popular in prisons and at Harvard.

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.

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.

Wealth usually comes from doing what other people find insufferably boring.

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.

The key to growth is quite simple: creative men with money. The cause of stagnation is similarly clear: depriving creative individuals of financial power.

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.

Capitalism begins with giving.

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.

A design isn't finished until somebody is using it. Brenda Laurel Intelligent design itself does not have any content.

History tells us that the threat to prosperity is not debt but socialism.

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.

The prevailing theory of capitalism suffers from one central and disabling flaw, a profound distrust and incomprehension of capitalism.

Most of America's leading entrepreneurs are bound to the masts of their fortunes. They are allowed to keep their wealth only as long as they invest it in others. In a real sense, they can keep only what they give away. It has been given to others in the form of investments. It is embodied in a vast web of enterprises that retains its worth only through constant work and sacrifice. Capitalism is a system that begins not with taking but with giving to others.

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.

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.

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.

All progress comes from the creative minority.

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.

The fact is there hasn't been a thrilling new erogenous zone discovered since de Sade.

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.

Quality is abundant. Time is the new scarcity.

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.

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.

Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises.

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.

[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.

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.

The envy of excellence leads to perdition; the love of it leads to the light.

Liberals force lower middle-class families, who love their children, to dispatch them to ghetto schools dominated by gangs of fatherless boys bearing knives.

This is what sexual liberation chiefly accomplishes-it liberates young women to pursue married men.