George Gilder Quotes

[The] zero-sum caricature [applies] much more accurately to socialism, which stifles the creation of new wealth and thus fosters a dog-eat-dog struggle over existing material resources.

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.

The fact is there hasn't been a thrilling new erogenous zone discovered since de Sade.

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.

In the history of enterprise, most of the protagonists of major new products and companies began their education - not in the classroom, where the old ways are taught, but in the factories and labs where new ways are wrought ... nothing has been so rare in recent years as an Ivy League graduate who has made a significant innovation in American enterprise.

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

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

Creativity is the foundation of wealth. All progress comes from the creative minority. Under capitalism, wealth is less a stock of goods than a flow of ideas, the defining characteristic of which is surprise. If it were not surprising, we could plan it, and socialism would work.

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

Liberals force lower middle-class families, who love their children, to dispatch them to ghetto schools dominated by gangs of fatherless boys bearing knives.

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

Most people consider themselves above the gritty and relentless details of life that allow the creation of great wealth. They leave it to the experts. But in general you join the one percent of the one percent not by leaving it to the experts but by creating new expertise, not by knowing what the experts know but by learning what they think is beneath them.

A culture that does not aspire to the divine becomes obsessed with the fascination of evil, reveling in the frivolous, the depraved, and the bestial.

Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises.

Some economists became obsessed with market efficiency and others with market failure. Generally held to be members of opposite schools-freshwater and saltwater, Chicago and Cambridge, liberal and conservative, Austrian and Keynesian-both sides share an essential economic vision. They see their discipline as successful insofar as it eliminates surprise-insofar, that is, as the inexorable workings of the machine override the initiatives of the human actors.

Most of America's leading entrepreneurs are bound to the masts of their fortunes. They are allowed to keep their wealth only as long as they invest it in others. In a real sense, they can keep only what they give away. It has been given to others in the form of investments. It is embodied in a vast web of enterprises that retains its worth only through constant work and sacrifice. Capitalism is a system that begins not with taking but with giving to others.

Capitalism begins with giving.

Real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind.

This is what sexual liberation chiefly accomplishes-it liberates young women to pursue married men.

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

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.