The Israel Test Quotes

“The most precious resource in the world economy is human genius.”
― George Gilder, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“Today, on a per capita basis, Israel far leads the world in research and technological creativity.”
― George Gilder, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“The envy of excellence leads to perdition; the love of it leads to the light.”
― George Gilder, The Israel Test

“The test distills into a few questions: What is your attitude toward people who surpass you in the creation of wealth or in other accomplishments? Do you aspire to equal their excellence, or does it make you seethe? Do you admire and celebrate exceptional achievement, or do you impugn it and seek to tear it down?”
― George Gilder, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“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, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“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, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“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, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“Shaul is sure that Israel’s test of survival, daily undergone, is the secret of Israeli enterprise. “When you’re concerned about your survival, every day, you think outside of the box”
― George Gilder, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“The force driving the Israelis decisively out of their socialist past into the modern world of finance was the ingenuity of Netanyahu.”
― George Gilder, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“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, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“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, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“It is not only the canary in the coal mine—it is also a crucial part of the mine.”
― George Gilder, The Israel Test

“Could the Gazans join the Israelis to create a Riviera on their exquisite beaches, their glowing sands? To do so, they would have to leave behind a world of zero-sum chimeras and fantasies of jihadist revenge. And they would discover that their greatest ally is a man long portrayed as their most feared enemy, a man who, having led for decades the fight to liberate Israeli Jews from self-destructive socialist resentment, now offers to bring all of Palestine and perhaps all of Arabia on the same journey. The vision of Benjamin Netanyahu is an Israel that, as a global financial center, could transform the economics of the Middle East.”
― George Gilder, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“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, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“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 Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“Netanyahu concludes: “We agree with that clear-sighted scholar who said, unreservedly, in plain language: ‘Anti-Semitism was born in Egypt.’” His book shows that motivating the Inquisition in Spain was not hostility to Jewish religion but rage against the superior effectiveness and ascendancy of Jews outperforming established clerics as Christians. “New Christians,” mostly Jewish, were taking over the Spanish church by being more learned, eloquent, devout, resourceful, and charismatic than Christian leaders. As Netanyahu writes, “The struggle against the Jews was essentially motivated by social and economic, rather than religious considerations . . .” For all their sage observations, Prager and Telushkin miss the heart of the matter, which is Jewish intellectual and entrepreneurial superiority.”
― George Gilder, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“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, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“Disguising this edifying process in the United States are the handi-capitalists in nominally “private” institutions – from Wall Street money-shufflers and government-guaranteed mortgage hustlers to corn-state ethanol farmers and Silicon Valley solar shills – that are dependent on public handouts and mandates for their success.”
― George Gilder, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“What makes capitalism succeed is not chiefly its structure of incentives but its use of knowledge and experience.”
― George Gilder, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“They imagine that the plight of the Palestinians reflects not their own Marxist angst, anti-Semitic obsessions, and recidivist violence but the actions of Israel. In their view, Israel’s wealth stems not from Jewish creativity and genius but from cadging aid from the United States or seizing valuable land and other resources from Arabs.”
― George Gilder, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“Gilder shows how, to the contrary, Israel’s growing prosperity will benefit the entire region in which it is located.”
― George Gilder, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy