George Gilder famous quotes

Bandwidth grows at least three times faster than computer power.
-- George Gilder

#Three #Computer #Programming

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

#Inspirational #Ideas #Desire

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

#Children #Men #Wife

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.
-- George Gilder

#Mind #Events #Matter

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.
-- George Gilder

#Motivation #Community #Identity

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.
-- George Gilder

#Government #Order #Diversity

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

#Real #Heart #School

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

#Confused #Women #Movement

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

#School #Successful #Opposites

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

#Belief #Wealth #Prison

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

#Unique #People #Creative

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

#Facts #Moral #Manners

Real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind.
-- George Gilder

#Real #Mind #Income

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

#Creativity #Hands #Order

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

#Punishment #Keys #Order

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.
-- George Gilder

#America #Wages #Fundamentals

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

#Broken #Income #Matter

In the history of enterprise, most of the protagonists of major new products and companies began their education
-- George Gilder

#Enterprise #Company #Protagonists

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.
-- George Gilder

#Ideas #Views #Imagination

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

#Opportunity #Order #Choices

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.
-- George Gilder

#Horse #Years #People

In order to understand the movement of prices, you need not an oscilloscope to measure the entire market and reduce it to noise, but a microscope to investigate the creative process behind every company and its price.
-- George Gilder

#Order #Creative #Noise

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.
-- George Gilder

#Years #Ivy #League

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.
-- George Gilder

#Powerful #Creativity #Appreciate

Quality is abundant. Time is the new scarcity.
-- George Gilder

#Time #Quality #Scarcity

In embracing change, entrepreneurs ensure social and economic stability.
-- George Gilder

#Entrepreneur #Economic #Social

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.
-- George Gilder

#Jobs #Past #Long

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

#Sex #Differences #Important

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.
-- George Gilder

#Achievement #Effort #World

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

#Men #Married #Young

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

#People #Television #Vulgar

Giving is the vital impulse and moral center of capitalism.
-- George Gilder

#Generosity #Giving #Moral

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

#Levels #Body #Males

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

#Light #Envy #Excellence

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

#Jobs #Children #Government

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

#Successful #Winning #Men

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

#Zero #Yield #Order

All progress comes from the creative minority.
-- George Gilder

#Creative #Progress #Minorities

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

#Debt #Prosperity #Socialism

All small returns are noise. To transcend the noise and the risk, seek outsized returns from technological paradigms.
-- George Gilder

#Risk #Noise #Return

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

#School #People #Degrees

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

#Priorities #Males #Roles

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

#Intelligent #Design #Doe

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

#Jobs #Organization #People