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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.

George Gilder

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George Gilder
Age: 84
Born: 1939
Born: November 29
Economist
Philosopher
Writer
New York City
New York
States
Learned
Virtues
Government
Virtue
Elsewhere
Take
Probably
Willingness
Important
Education
Valuable
Credentials
World
Society
Ambition
Diligence
United
Skills
Socially
History
Discipline
Mobile
Jobs
Risk
Risks

More quotes by 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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The first priority of any serious program against poverty is to strengthen the male role in poor families.
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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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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Unlike an inexorable, Newtonian great machine, the economy is not a closed system.
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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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 differences between the sexes are the single most important fact of human society.
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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In embracing change, entrepreneurs ensure social and economic stability.
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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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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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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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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Intelligent design itself does not have any content.
George Gilder
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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.
George Gilder
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Capitalism begins with giving.
George Gilder
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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.
George Gilder
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Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises.
George Gilder