Quote

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

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George Gilder
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: November 29
Economist
Philosopher
Writer
New York City
New York
Effort
Predatory
Belief
Rewarded
Place
Bleak
Nothing
Preferred
World
Deadly
Ahead
Management
Discriminatory
Achievement
Specially

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Real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind.
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In embracing change, entrepreneurs ensure social and economic stability.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Unlike an inexorable, Newtonian great machine, the economy is not a closed system.
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Capitalism begins with giving.
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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.
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The prevailing theory of capitalism suffers from one central and disabling flaw, a profound distrust and incomprehension of capitalism.
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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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Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises.
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All small returns are noise. To transcend the noise and the risk, seek outsized returns from technological paradigms.
George Gilder
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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
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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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Hatred of producers of wealth still flourishes and has become, in fact, the racism of the intelligentsia.
George Gilder
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Intelligent design itself does not have any content.
George Gilder
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In the history of enterprise, most of the protagonists of major new products and companies began their education
George Gilder
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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.
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