Top 60 George Gilder Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises.”

— George Gilder

2. “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

3. “If government could create jobs and raise children, socialism would have worked.”

— George Gilder

4. “If it moves tax it. If it keeps moving regulate it. If it stops moving subsidize it.”

— George Gilder

5. “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

6. “All progress comes from the creative minority.”

— George Gilder

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

— George Gilder

8. “A design isn’t finished until somebody is using it. Brenda Laurel Intelligent design itself does not have any content.”

— George Gilder

9. “If the Arabs put down their weapons today there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel. BENJAMIN NETANYAHU.”

— George Gilder

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

— George Gilder

11. “Quality is abundant. Time is the new scarcity.”

— George Gilder

12. “Real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind.”

— George Gilder

13. “In embracing change, entrepreneurs ensure social and economic stability.”

— George Gilder

14. “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

15. “Giving is the vital impulse and moral center of capitalism.”

— George Gilder

16. “Wealth usually comes from doing what other people find insufferably boring.”

— George Gilder

17. “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

18. “The blind spot of AI is that consciousness does not emerge from thought; it is the source of.”

— George Gilder

19. “Capitalism begins with giving.”

— George Gilder

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “All small returns are noise. To transcend the noise and the risk, seek outsized returns from technological paradigms.”

— George Gilder

26. “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

27. “Bandwidth grows at least three times faster than computer power.”

— George Gilder

28. “The differences between the sexes are the single most important fact of human society.”

— George Gilder

29. “Activity and creativity almost always flow to the least regulated arena.”

— George Gilder

30. “The most precious resource in the world economy is human genius.”

— George Gilder

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

— George Gilder

32. “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

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

— George Gilder

34. “Nothing is more deadly to achievement than the belief that effort will not be rewarded, that the world is a bleak and discriminatory place in which only the predatory and the specially preferred can get ahead.”

— George Gilder

35. “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

36. “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

37. “The envy of excellence leads to perdition; the love of it leads to the light.”

— George Gilder

38. “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

39. “Money is not a magic wand but a measuring stick, not wealth but a gauge of it.”

— George Gilder

40. “Unlike an inexorable, Newtonian “great machine”, the economy is not a closed system.”

— George Gilder

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “Locked in a debate over Israel’s alleged vices, they miss the salient truth running through the long history of anti-Semitism: Israel is hated above all for its virtues.”

— George Gilder

46. “Midas’s error was to mistake gold, wealth’s monetary measure, for wealth itself. But wealth is not a thing or a random sequence. It is inextricably rooted in hard won knowledge over extended time.”

— George Gilder

47. “In the history of enterprise, most of the protagonists of major new products and companies began their education.”

— George Gilder

48. “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

49. “Aim at performance, and low cost will follow. Aim at low cost, and you will not achieve sufficient performance to have an enduring business. After a sufficient system is devised, demand will foster economies of scale and learning curves that bring the price down over time.”

— George Gilder

50. “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