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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: 85
Born: 1939
Born: November 29
Economist
Philosopher
Writer
New York City
New York
Jobs
Risk
Risks
States
Learned
Virtues
Government
Virtue
Elsewhere
Take
Probably
Willingness
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Education
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Credentials
World
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Ambition
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United
Skills
Socially
History
Discipline
Mobile

More quotes by 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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All small returns are noise. To transcend the noise and the risk, seek outsized returns from technological paradigms.
George Gilder
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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
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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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
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Capitalism begins with giving.
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
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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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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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Hatred of producers of wealth still flourishes and has become, in fact, the racism of the intelligentsia.
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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Wealth usually comes from doing what other people find insufferably boring.
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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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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A design isn't finished until somebody is using it. Brenda Laurel Intelligent design itself does not have any content.
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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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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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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The envy of excellence leads to perdition the love of it leads to the light.
George Gilder