Gilder Quotes & Sayings

In an information economy, entrepreneurs master the science of information in order to overcome the laws of the purely physical sciences. They can succeed because of the surprising power of the laws of information, which are conducive to human creativity. The central concept of information theory is a measure of freedom of choice. The principle of matter, on the other hand, is not liberty but limitation- it has weight and occupies space. — George Gilder

I count my time by times that I meet thee;
These are my yesterdays, my morrows, noons,
And nights, these are my old moons and my new moons.
Slow fly the hours, fast the hours flee,
If thou art far from or art near to me:
If thou art far, the bird's tunes are no tunes;
If thou art near, the wintry days are Junes. — Richard Watson Gilder

Spontaneous order is self-contradictory. Spontaneity connotes the ebullition of surprises. It is highly entropic and disorderly. It is entrepreneurial and complex. Order connotes predictability and equilibrium. It is what is not spontaneous. It includes moral codes, constitutional restraints, personal disciplines, educational integrity, predictable laws, reliable courts, stable money, trustworthy finance, strong families, dependable defense, and police powers. Order requires political guidance, sovereignty, and leadership. It normally entails religious beliefs. The entire saga of the history of the West conveys the courage and sacrifice necessary to enforce and defend these values against their enemies. — George Gilder

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

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

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

Opening the book is a quotation from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops that sums up the Prager-Telushkin view: It was Judaism that brought the concept of a God-given universal moral law into the world ... The Jew carries the burden of God in history [and] for this has never been forgiven. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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

A man not perfect, but of heart so high, of such heroic rage, That even his hopes became a part of earth's eternal heritage. — Richard Watson Gilder

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

In embracing change, entrepreneurs ensure social and economic stability. — George Gilder

When capitalists are thwarted, deflected, or dispossessed, the generals and politicians, ... and socialist intellectuals, are always amazed at how quickly the great physical means of production - the contested tokens of wealth and resources of nature - dissolve into so much scrap, ruined concrete, snarled wire, and wilderness. — George Gilder

A day doesn't pass that I'm not surprised. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

In the moments when I forgot to remind myself to remain calm, I rewarded myself with a multiversed chorus of self-denigration and blame. Weak. Inadequate. Damaged. A problem and a disappointment. The litany of criticism stuck in my brain, skipping through the same tired phrases, like an old, scratched, forty-five speed record, drumming my failure into the silence of the night, adding to my desperation and frustration. I had been singled out for the universe for a reason, and this illness was my fault. I knew that, even though saying as much out loud sounded like crazy talk. I couldn't explain why, but I felt like I deserved what I was getting. — Ginny Gilder

Since ancient Time began,
Ever on some great soul God laid an infinite burden
The weight of all this world, the hopes of man,
Conflict and pain, and fame immortal are his guerdon. — Richard Watson Gilder

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

Economic growth springs not chiefly from incentives - carrots and sticks, rewards and punishments for workers and entrepreneurs. The incentive theory of capitalism allows its critics to depict it as an inhumane scheme of clever manipulation of human needs and hungers scarcely superior to the more benign forms of slavery. Wealth actually springs from the expansion of information and learning, profits and creativity that enhance the human qualities of its beneficiaries as it enriches them. Workers' learning increasingly compensates for their labor, which imparts knowledge as it extracts work. Joining knowledge and power, capitalism focuses on the entropy of human minds and the benefits of freedom. Thus it is the most humane of all economic systems. — George Gilder

Ever since the millennial crash, the United States has been buffeted by currency shocks, interest-rate gyrations, and financial device bubbles. Government fashions move "investment" from real estate consumption to climate distractions. It was technology alone that saved the world economy. — George Gilder

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

Entrepreneurial creation is the generation, de novo, of novelty and surprise - freedom of choice originating in the world of ideas, and imagination beyond all concern with chemicals. The contrary view - that all ideas are determined by material relationships - is the materialist superstition. — George Gilder

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

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. — George Gilder

Capitalism begins with giving. — George Gilder

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

Giving is the vital impulse and moral center of capitalism. — George Gilder

An economics of systems only-an economics of markets but not of men-is fatally flawed. — George Gilder

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

The power in capitalism must not be mindless. Unless it is combined with knowledge, mere economic power or money is fruitless. Enterprise involves memory of the past and anticipation of the future, and it is creative. It is not a simple incentive system of rewards and punishments, of carrots and sticks. It is an information system, and it is governed less by economic theory as we know it than by information theory. — George Gilder

Much of the market is mindlessly indexed. That means it is all beta. The knowledge is leaching away in the surf of noise and rapid trading. — George Gilder

Real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind. — George Gilder

An economy is a "noosphere" (a mind-based system), and it can revive as quickly as minds and policies can change. — George Gilder

Even though Jews are a tiny minority of less than a tenth of 1 percent of the world's people, they comprise perhaps a quarter of the world's paramount capitalists and entrepreneurs. — George Gilder

I think I'm different. I've got alpha, baby ... I think I can find the profits of surprise, the yield of real knowledge. Everyone says that, of course, but most investors are all beta
just volatility, just the random motion of the surf ... they get killed. To generate alpha, I need help, direction, signposts, analysts, and sometimes even brandy-toting salesmen. — 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

From Adam Smith's pin factory to Moore's Law of microchips, the division of labor drives the extension of the market, not the other way around. Supply creates its own demand through the proliferation of goods and services down the curves of learning, entropy, and imagination. — 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

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

Today, on a per capita basis, Israel far leads the world in research and technological creativity. — George Gilder

In order to understand the movement of prices, you need not an oscilloscope to measure the entire market and reduce it to noise, but a microscope to investigate the creative process behind every company and its price. — 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

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

Intelligent design itself does not have any content. — George Gilder

What if thou be saint or sinner,
Crooked gray-beard, straight beginner,
Empty paunch, or jolly dinner,
When Death thee shall call.
All like are rich or richer,
King with crown, and cross-legged stitcher,
When the grave hides all. — Richard Watson Gilder

Originating in large scale electronic warfare and anti-jamming technologies for the battlefield devised by two Russian immigrants, these now one-chip systems can fit in a handset and enable intercommunication among the towers of Babel in urban America. — George Gilder

Devoid of the outside influences of capital and technology, the source of bitcoin value becomes the pure irreversible passage of time. The — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

Let us imagine the lineaments of an economics of disorder, disequilibrium, and surprise that could explain and measure the contributions of entrepreneurs. Such an economics would begin with the Smithian mold of order and equilibrium. Smith himself spoke of property rights, free trade, sound currency, and modest taxation as conditions necessary for prosperity. He was right: disorder, disequilibrium, chaos, and noise inhibit the creative acts that engender growth. The ultimate physical entropy envisaged as the heat death of the universe, in its total disorder, affords no room for invention or surprise. But entrepreneurial disorder is not chaos or mere noise. Entrepreneurial disorder is some combination of order and upheaval that might be termed informative disorder. — George Gilder

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

She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her, and it is as if I had lost a part of myself. — Cassandra Austen

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

The information glut has become a ruling cliche. As all resources - from energy to information - become more abundant, the presure of economic scarcity falls ever more heavily on one key residual, and that single shortage looms ever more stringent and controlling. The governing scarcity of the information economy is time: the shards of a second, the hours in a day, the years in a life, the latency of memory, the delay in aluminum wires, the time to market, the time to metastasis, the time to retirement. — George Gilder

Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises. — George Gilder

What makes capitalism succeed is not chiefly its structure of incentives but its use of knowledge and experience. — 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

The risk-bearing role of the rich cannot be performed so well by anyone else. The benefits of capitalism still depend on capitalists. The other groups on the pyramid of wealth should occasionally turn from the spectacles of consumption long enough to see the adventure on the frontiers of the economy above them - an adventure not without its note of nobility ... — George Gilder

Oh, father's gone to market-town, he was up before the day,
And Jamie's after robins, and the man is making hay,
And whistling down the hollow goes the boy that minds the mill,
While mother from the kitchen door is calling with a will,
"Polly!-Polly!-
The cows are in the corn!
Oh, where's Polly?" — Richard Watson Gilder

The key to growth is quite simple: creative men with money. The cause of stagnation is similarly clear: depriving creative individuals of financial power. — George Gilder

What babe new born is this that in a manger cries? Near on her lowly bed his happy mother lies. Oh, see the air is shaken with white and heavenly wings
This is the Lord of all the earth, this is the King of Kings. — Richard Watson Gilder

Ye living soldiers of the mighty war,
Once more from roaring cannon and the drums
And bugles blown at morn, the summons comes;
Forget the halting limb, each wound and scar:
Once more your Captain calls to you;
Come to his last review! — Richard Watson Gilder

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

Against the darkness outer God's light his likeness takes, And he from the mighty doubter The great believer makes. — Richard Watson Gilder

Under Arab rule, Palestine had always been a somnolent desert land that could have sustained no authentic twentieth-century Arab awakening. Palestine without Jews is a not a nation but a naqba. — George Gilder

The war between the centrifuge of knowledge and the centripetal pull of power remains the prime conflict in all economies. Reconciling the two impulses is a new economics, an economics that puts free will and the innovating entrepreneur not on the periphery but at the center of the system. It is an economics of surprise that distributes power as it extends knowledge. It is an economics of disequilibrium and disruption that tests its inventions in the crucible of a competitive marketplace. It is an economics that accords with the constantly surprising fluctuations of our lives. — 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

Warren Buffett summed up the conventional view with his usual pith: "Gold gets dug out of the ground ... we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it ... Anyone from Mars would be scratching their head."2 — George Gilder

In a world where women do not say no, the man is never forced to settle down and make serious choices. His sex drive
the most powerful compulsion in his life
is never used to make him part of civilization as the supporter of a family. If a woman does not force him to make a long-term commitment
to marry
in general, he doesn't. It is maternity that requires commitment. His sex drive only demands conquest, driving him from body to body in an unsettling hunt for variety and excitement in which much of the thrill is in the chase itself.
The man still needs to be tamed. His problem is that many young women think they have better things to do than socialize single men. — George Gilder

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

Innovation is always a product of individual innovators, a rare and dynamic breed not always appealing to the millions who depend on their creativity for their own comfort, health, and security. — George Gilder

Wealth usually comes from doing what other people find insufferably boring. — George Gilder

Denying the necessary role of the creative mind as expressed in capital and technology, Marx ended up vindicating the zero-sum vision of anti-Semitic envy, in which bankers, capitalists, arbitrageurs, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, and traders are deemed to be parasitical shysters and dispensable middlemen. — George Gilder

Some are born to invent, others to embellish; but the gilder attracts more attention than the architect. — Luc De Clapiers

Like the railroads that bankrupted a previous generation of visionary entrepreneurs and built the foundations of an industrial nation, fiber-optic webs, storewidth breakthroughs, data centers, and wireless systems installed over the last five years will enable and endow the next generation of entrepreneurial wealth. As Mead states, "the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life was to get a company going during the bubble". Now, Mead says, "there's space available; you can get fab runs; you can get vendors to answer the phone. You can make deals with people; you can sit down and they don't spend their whole time telling you how they're a hundred times smarter than you. It's absolutely amazing. You can actually get work done now, which means what's happening now is that the entrepreneurs, the technologists, are building the next generation technology that isn't visible yet but upon which will be built the biggest expansion of productivity the world has ever seen. — George Gilder

From Pastor Malthus to the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth; from hysteria over DDT, PCBs, and natural gas "fracking"; to continuing bouts of chemo-phobia and population panic; the achievements of capitalism have suffered a long series of detractions. The factitious and febrile campaign against global warming is only the latest binge of self-abuse among the children of prosperity. — George Gilder

Quality is abundant. Time is the new scarcity. — George Gilder

Better than honor and glory, and History's iron pen, Was the thought of duty done and the love of his fellow-men. — Richard Watson Gilder

In Heaven's happy bowers
There blossom two flowers,
One with fiery glow
And one as white as snow;
While lo! before them stands,
With pale and trembling hands,
A spirit who must choose
One, and one refuse. — Richard Watson Gilder

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. — George Gilder

In a free economy, a high degree of apparent randomness does not mean actual randomness. An apparently random pattern is evidence not of purposelessness but of an entrepreneurial economy full of creative surprises. — George Gilder

With currencies and interest rates far more volatile than the economic activity that they guide, the horizons of investment and commerce had to shrink proportionally with real economic knowledge. — George Gilder

A new generation of avaricious and egocentric Americans, in the thrall of anti-industrial ideologies, shuns the productive adventures of creation to pursue the comfort and security of the welfare state, abetted by the discount windows at the Federal Reserve, guarantees for "green jobs" and solar enterprises, the triple-A assurances of Fannie and Freddie, and the bonanzas with which we reward litigation against the productive. — George Gilder

Although some observers believe that feminism and sexual liberalism no longer threaten family values, little in fact has changed. Contemporary sexual liberals are merely less honest than earlier feminists in facing the inevitable antifamily consequences of their beliefs. They continue to maintain that the differences between men and women, such as men's greater drive to produce in the workplace, are somehow artificial and dispensable. They still insist that men and women can generally share and reverse roles without jeopardizing marriage. They still encourage a young woman to sacrifice her twenties in intense rivalry with men, leaving her to clutch desperately for marriage as her youthfulness and fertility pass. Although they declare themselves supporters of the family, they are scarcely willing to define it. — George Gilder

Under capitalism, economic power flows not to the intellectual, who manipulates ideas and basks in their light, but to the man who gives himself to his ideas and tests them with his own wealth and work. — George Gilder

Highly competitive athletes like Ginny Gilder have a gift for tolerating pain and ignoring adversity. They accept these things as the price they pay for greatness. These habits of mind and body serve us well in many aspects of our lives, but not in all aspects of our lives. Course Correction is about taking time to heal and exploring the joy that lies beyond adversity. — Tori Murden

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

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 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

We lean on Faith; and some less wise have cried, "Behold the butterfly, the see that's cast!" Vain hopes that fall like flowers before the blast! What man can look on Death unterrified? — Richard Watson Gilder

Republicans have been running on tax-cut proposals since the era of Harding and Coolidge. Tax-rate reductions and simplifications are urgently needed. But again, there is no mention of the key problems of a global economy in decline - of the acceptance by economic elites of inevitable and irremediable stagnation. We have not faced the fact that the Federal Reserve's capacity to command growth is a god that has failed. — George Gilder

Welfare now erodes work and family and thus keeps poor people poor. Accompanying welfare is an ideology - sustaining a whole system of federal and state bureaucracies - that also operates to destroy their faith. The ideology takes the form of false theories of discrimination and spurious claims of racism and sexism as the dominant forces in the lives of the poor. — George Gilder

But I still don't have knowledge, interpreting the surprises that others don't know about, that will drive a new narrative. You have to work and think and stress and fret to surmise the surprises by first fathoming the pulse. — George Gilder

Egalitarians never seem to understand that promoting economic equality in theory means promoting resentments and polarization in practice, making everyone worse off. - Thomas Sowell (2016) — George Gilder

I am the laughter of the new-born child On whose soft-breathing sleep an angel smiled. — Richard Watson Gilder

All small returns are noise. To transcend the noise and the risk, seek outsized returns from technological paradigms. — George Gilder

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

To declare enthusiasm for feminist ideals is almost a new mode of macho, a way to flaunt an invulnerable virility. Many will dismiss feminism as merely a matter of domestic logistics ... Mention procreation, and they talk about the population explosion. They believe it is just as well that many women indicate disinterest in having children. — George Gilder

[Successful] projects that entrepreneurs initiated and carried through had one essential quality. All had been thoroughly contemplated by the regnant experts and dominant companies, with their large research staffs and financial resources, and had been judged too difficult, untimely, risky, expensive and unprofitable. — George Gilder

President Obama's friend and counselor Ta-Nehisi Coates, from his perch atop the bestseller lists and at the pinnacle of power in America, denounces the American Dream, in terms that echo Obama's previous spiritual guide, Pastor Wright in Chicago, as a genocidal weight of whiteness. — George Gilder