Enterprise Quotes - Page 10

• The enterprise of describing something in language that has never been described before is a very difficult thing to do. When you decide to do away with old cliches or old phraseologies, and to come up with a new way of saying something, it's extremely difficult.

  Gao Xingjian

  Way, Language, Cliche

  "A Conversation with Gao Xingjian". Interview with David Der-Wei Wang, asiasociety.org.

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• It is a popular error that bureaucracy is less flexible than private enterprise. It may be so in detail, but when large scale adaptations have to be made, central control is far more flexible. It may take two months to get an answer to a letter from a government department, but it takes twenty years for an industry under private enterprise to readjust itself to a fall in demand.

  Joan Robinson

  Fall, Years, Two

  Joan Robinson (2014). “Contributions to Modern Economics”, p.27, Academic Press

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• This is the greatest discovery of the scientific enterprise: You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebuds, giraffes and humans.

  Brian Swimme

  Discovery, Hydrogen, Giraffe

  What Is Enlightenment? Magazine Interview, storyoftheuniverse.org.

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• It is a fact of human nature that we derive pleasure from watching others engage in pleasurable acts. This explains the popularity of two enterprises: pornography and cafés.

  Eric Weiner

  Two, Facts, Human Nature

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• Gore Vidal, the American writer, once described the American economic system as 'free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich'. Macroeconomic policy on the global scale is a bit like that. It is Keynesianism for the rich countries and monetarism for the poor.

  Ha-Joon Chang

  Country, Rich Countries, Socialism

  Ha-Joon Chang (2007). “Bad Samaritans: rich nations, poor policies, and the threat to the developing world”, Century

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• [I believe in] the throne...parliamentary institutions...private enterprise and individual opinion against the socialization of the state...equity in the distribution of public burdens and strict maintenance of public faith with the creditors of the state [and] a fresh guarantee of peace by an alliance with France and...Belgium for the defence of our common interests against unprovoked attack.

  Austen Chamberlain

  Believe, Thrones, Maintenance

  "The Impact of Labour, 1920-1924: The Beginnings of Modern British Politics" by Maurice Cowling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (p. 147), 1971.

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• So the Bush-Obama administration has taken a fiscal stance diametrically opposed to that of the patron saint of free enterprise. While escalating war in Afghanistan and maintaining over 850 military bases around the world, the administration has run up the national debt that Smith decried. By shifting the tax burden off property and off rent-seeking monopolies - above all, off the financial sector - this policy has raised America's cost of living and doing business, thereby undercutting its competitive power and running up larger and larger foreign debt.

  Michael Hudson

  Running, Military, War

  "Adam Smith Critiques the Deficit Reduction Commission". Personal website, michael-hudson.com. December 06, 2010.

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• The diversity of institutions has made possible the combination of government ownership and private enterprise which has been a further characteristic of Canadian development. Canada has remained fundamentally a product of Europe.

  Harold Innis

  Government, Europe, Diversity

  Harold Adams Innis (1995). “Staples, Markets, and Cultural Change: Selected Essays”, p.21, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

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• The left's obsession with corporations as a spawn of evil is pathological paranoia. A corporation is just one form of organizing a private business enterprise for purposes of limiting personal liability, issuing stock, filing financial reports and paying taxes. Other forms include partnerships and sole proprietorships. Are they less evil? You buy your groceries from corporations, your cars, newspapers, cellphones, clothing and exercise equipment. Your parents and children work for corporations. Are they evil?

  Mike Rosen

  Children, Exercise, Evil

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• People have to understand that unless social enterprise is experimental, it will not succeed in making a difference.

  Jacqueline Novogratz

  Differences, People, Making A Difference

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• Good human relations not only bring great personal rewards but are essential to the success of any enterprise.

  J. R. D. Tata

  Essentials, Rewards, Relation

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• Contrary to received wisdom, the British are not an insular people in the conventional sense - far from it. For most of their early modern and modern history, they have had more contact with more parts of the world than almost any other nation - it is just that this contact has regularly taken the form of aggressive military and commercial enterprise.

  Linda Colley

  Military, Taken, People

  Linda Colley (2005). “Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837”, p.8, Yale University Press

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• All the controversialists who have become conscious of the real issue are already saying of our ideal exactly what used to be said of the Socialists' ideal. They are saying that private property is too ideal not to be impossible. They are saying that private enterprise is too good to be true. They are saying that the idea of ordinary men owning ordinary possessions is against the laws of political economy and requires an alteration in human nature.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Men, Law

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• We know that the only alternative to private competition is government monopoly of enterprise. We know that when government monopolizes production, distribution, and employment, it is no longer the servant of men - it is their master. And, therefore, we know that economic liberty and political liberty are inseparable parts of the same ball of wax - that we must keep them both, or we shall lose them both.

  Benjamin Franklin Fairless

  Wisdom, Men, Political

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• When incentive to acquire and obtain property is gone, people no longer make efforts to acquire any... Those who infringe upon property rights commit an injustice... If this occurs repeatedly, all incentives to cultural enterprise are destroyed and they cease utterly to make an effort. This leads to destruction and ruin of civilization.

  Ibn Khaldun

  Wisdom, Rights, Civilization

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• Free enterprise is a natural result of the American form of government, which says in so many words that the more men do for themselves, the less government does for them, the better off we will all be.

  Felix Morley

  Wisdom, Men, Doe

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• Our Founding Fathers well understood that concentrated power is the enemy of liberty and the rights of man. They knew that the American experiment in individual liberty, free enterprise and republican self-government could succeed only if power were widely distributed. And since in any society social and political power flow from economic power, they saw that wealth and property would have to be widely distributed among the people of the country. The truth of this insight is immediately apparent.

  Ronald Reagan

  Country, Wisdom, Father

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• Could there be anything resembling a free enterprise economy, if wealth and property were concentrated in the hands of a few, while the great majority owned little more than the shirts on their backs?

  Ronald Reagan

  Wisdom, Hands, Majority

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• The libertarian good society lies... in the maximum dispersion of property compatible with effective production or, as process, in progressive reconciliation of conflicts between equality and efficiency. Such process involves increasing dispersion both of wealth among persons and families and of proximate productional control among enterprises or firms.

  Henry Calvert Simons

  Wisdom, Lying, Politics

  Henry Calvert Simons (1948). “Economic Policy for a Free Society”

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• If one examines the American idea of freedom, the individual, free enterprise, their Constitution, their political and economic structures as well as their mode of exploiting their natural resources, all these are shrouded in the idea of justice.

  Ndabaningi Sithole

  Ideas, Justice, Political

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• We very much hope that as we get growth that we can reduce the burden of taxation, that we can reduce income tax and increase the amount of genuine free enterprise and business enterprise... This is going... toward the restoration of the personal responsibility, the independence, with every man a property owner, every man a capitalist.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Wisdom, Responsibility, Men

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• As I see it, creative achievement is the very heart of the human enterprise... The destiny of man, of all men and of each man, is that he is condemned to invent what he will be - condemned if he is fearful but blessed if he welcomes the great adventure. We are responsible in the last analysis, not simply for what we are, but for what we will become; and that is a source of either high excitement or distress.

  Paul Kurtz

  Blessed, Adventure, Heart

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• Our example - and commitment - to freedom has changed the world. But along with the genius of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights, is the equal genius of our economic system. Our Founding Fathers endeavored to create a moral and just society like no other in history, and out of that grew a moral and just economic system the likes of which the world had never seen. Our freedom, what it means to be an American, has been defined and sustained by the liberating power of the free enterprise system.

  Mitt Romney

  Father, Mean, Commitment

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• Plain experience and common sense inform us that no abstract Person can have made us as we are without also wishing to delete us and start over (Gen. 8:21; Zeph. 1:2). Therefore, the existence of cruel and arbitrary nature, together with the universality of human sin, prevents us from beginning the theological enterprise with any concept of God that is distinct from revelation. All theologies of a cosmic harmonic principle shipwreck on the truths of tragedy, catastrophe, and injustice.

  Paul F. M. Zahl

  Common Sense, Starting Over, Together

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• The enterprise of America precedes that of Europe, as the industry of England precedes that of the rest of Europe.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Europe, America, England

  Benjamin Disraeli, Edmund Gosse, Robert Arnot (1904). “The works of Benjamin Disraeli, earl of Beaconsfield: embracing novels, romances, plays, poems, biography, short stories and great speeches”

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