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: 84
Born: 1939
Born: November 29
Economist
Philosopher
Writer
New York City
New York
World
Deadly
Ahead
Management
Discriminatory
Achievement
Specially
Effort
Predatory
Belief
Rewarded
Place
Bleak
Nothing
Preferred

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In embracing change, entrepreneurs ensure social and economic stability.
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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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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.
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In the history of enterprise, most of the protagonists of major new products and companies began their education
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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.
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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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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.
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Activity and creativity almost always flow to the least regulated arena.
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The differences between the sexes are the single most important fact of human society.
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The envy of excellence leads to perdition the love of it leads to the light.
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The first priority of any serious program against poverty is to strengthen the male role in poor families.
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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.
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Hatred of producers of wealth still flourishes and has become, in fact, the racism of the intelligentsia.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Wealth usually comes from doing what other people find insufferably boring.
George Gilder