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

George Gilder

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George Gilder
Age: 84
Born: 1939
Born: November 29
Economist
Philosopher
Writer
New York City
New York
Leads
Light
Love
Perdition
Excellence
Envy

More quotes by George Gilder

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The prevailing theory of capitalism suffers from one central and disabling flaw, a profound distrust and incomprehension of capitalism.
George Gilder
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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
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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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Unlike an inexorable, Newtonian great machine, the economy is not a closed system.
George Gilder
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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.
George Gilder
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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.
George Gilder
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Real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind.
George Gilder
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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.
George Gilder
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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.
George Gilder
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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.
George Gilder
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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
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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.
George Gilder
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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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Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises.
George Gilder
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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.
George Gilder
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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
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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.
George Gilder
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In embracing change, entrepreneurs ensure social and economic stability.
George Gilder
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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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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