George Gilder Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

A successful economy depends on the proliferation of the rich, on creating a large class of risk-taking men who are willing to shun the easy channels of a comfortable life in order to create new enterprise, win huge profits, and invest them again.

George Gilder
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
The crucial role of the rich in a capitalist economy is... to invest; to provide unencumbered and unbureaucratized cash.

George Gilder
Bandwidth grows at least three times faster than computer power.

George Gilder
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
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
Unlike an inexorable, Newtonian "great machine", the economy is not a closed system.

George Gilder
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
By merely foreswearing violence and taking advantage of their unique position contiguous with the world's most creative people, the Palestinians could be rich and happy.

George Gilder
The belief that all wealth comes from stealing is popular in prisons and at Harvard.

George Gilder
Capitalism offers nothing but frustrations and rebuffs to those who wish - because of claimed superiority of intelligence, birth, credentials, or ideals - to get without giving, to take without risking, to profit without sacrifice, to be exalted without humbling themselves to understand others and meet their needs.

George Gilder
From the equilibrium and spontaneous order of Adam Smith and his heirs, from invisible-handed markets and perfect competition, supply and demand, and rewards and punishments, I was pushed to theories of disequilibrium and disorder, and information and noise, as the keys to understanding economic progress.

George Gilder
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.

George Gilder
Hatred of producers of wealth still flourishes and has become, in fact, the racism of the intelligentsia.

George Gilder
The fundamental fact in the lives of the poor in most parts of America is that the wages of common labor are far below the benefits of AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, public defenders, leisure time and all the other goods and services of the welfare state.

George Gilder
The key role of entrepreneurs, like the most crucial role of scientists, is not to fill in the gaps in an existing market or theory, but to generate entirely new markets or theories...They stand before a canvas as empty as any painter's; a page as blank as any poet's.

George Gilder
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
Like the Pentagon, our social science often reduces all phenomena to dollars and body counts. Sexuality, family unity, kinship, masculine solidarity, maternity, motivation, nurturing, all the rituals of personal identity and development, all the bonds of community, seem "sexist," "superstitious," "mystical," "inefficient," "discriminatory." And, of course, they are -- and they are also indispensable to a civilized society.

George Gilder
The prevailing theory of capitalism suffers from one central and disabling flaw, a profound distrust and incomprehension of capitalism.

George Gilder
Futurists falter because they belittle the power of religious paradigms, deeming them either too literal or too fantastic.

George Gilder
The first priority of any serious program against poverty is to strengthen the male role in poor families.

George Gilder
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
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
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
History tells us that the threat to prosperity is not debt but socialism.

George Gilder
The differences between the sexes are the single most important fact of human society.

George Gilder
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
The analogy between Shannon and codes in biology isn't something that sprang from my belief in God... except maybe on some deeper or more transcendent level.

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

George Gilder
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