Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It removes information from the market when I need more and more...Indexing is a waste heap--information so merged and muffled that it hides knowledge rather than reveals it. All beta, no alpha.

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

When Homo sapiens came along, after all, the Neanderthals had a hard time, and virtually all animals were subdued. The lucky ones became pets, the unlucky lunch.

Traditionally the haven currency was the U.S. dollar, but since early 2018—from Greece to Venezuela, from Argentina to Zimbabwe—the haven has increasingly been bitcoin.

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.

Yet economics purports to be strangely exempt from this fact of life. From Adam Smith's day to our own, the chief concern of the discipline has been to render economic events unsurprising...The discernment of orderly rules governing the apparent chaos of life was a remarkable achievement and continues to amaze.

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.

The passion for finding the system in experience, replacing surprise with order, is a persistent part of human nature...Science came to mean the elimination of surprise. It outlawed miracles, because miracles are above all unexpected.

Ignored...was the one unbridgeable gap between physics and any such science of human behavior: the surprises that arise from free will and human creativity...they constitute the most important economic events. For a miracle is simply an innovation, a sudden and bountiful addition of information to the system.

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

The Newtonian scheme became an illusion of determinism in a tempestuous world of human actions. Economists became preoccupied with mechanical models of markets and uninterested in the willful people who inhabit them.

The intellectuals of this era are simply blind to the reality of consciousness. Consciousness is who we are, how we think, and how we know.

Dmitry Buterin introduced his son to bitcoin, and Robert Russell, now CFO of Luminar, pushed Austin ahead in optics.

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.

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)

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.

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.

The source and root of all monetary evil [is] the government monopoly on the issue and control of money. —Friedrich Hayek

The index is retrospective. The crucial alpha, the entropy, the signal modulating that linear advance...comes from knowledge of the entrepreneurial surprises harbored on the edge of the noise.