Charles Koch Quotes
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Let's say I am a chocoholic and I eat tons of chocolate a day. A hundred thousands of tons a day. I have this craving, but I can't afford it, so I get a printing press, and I start printing money, and I print billions and billions to buy chocolate. So I create this boom in the chocolate industry, so stores are running out of chocolate. So they have demand, so chocolate makers expand. Cocoa growers expand. You create this great boom. But now the feds arrest me and shut me down. And now there is a depression in the chocolate industry. That's what happens with the monetary policy.
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Innovation comes from recombining existing technology and different perspectives in innovative ways.
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I've had the philosophy that John Adams expressed, in the kind of system that we're trying to create in this country: that this is a system for moral people. It will work for no other.
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Why I've never been that fond of politics and only got into it recently kicking and screaming, because I don't think politicians are going to reverse the trajectory of this country. I think it's going to depend on the American people understanding what is fair and what makes their lives better.
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I feel a passion for what we're trying to do.I mean, why does somebody who's old who's a writer keep writing? Because that's who they are.
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My father would always say "learn everything you can and whenever you can, because you never know when it'll come in handy."
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If you never failed, then you're probably not doing very much.
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Putting aside all the things that are said about Hillary [Clinton], my main difference with her is on the vision of what kind of society will make people's lives better. So this is a vision of society in which people are too evil or stupid to run their own lives, but those in power are perfectly capable of running everybody else's lives because they're so much smarter.
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Both my parents were a tremendous influence on me. My father's influence came from - he decided well, probably before we were born that as he put it, 'I'm not going to have any kids who are country club bums.'
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The good and the bad news is that politicians rarely do what they say they are going to do when they campaign.
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I always wanted to be different and do things differently. I was a pain in the neck. I was challenging everything you wanted me to do and challenging people in school.
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A lot of the Republican rhetoric better than the Democrats'. But when they're in office, it's pretty much the same thing. It's serving their supporters, it's corporate welfare, it's cronyism which is so destructive, particularly to the disadvantaged.
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We create these boom-bust cycles by manipulating the money supply and the interest rates and directing it where it went in. And that is what happened with housing: pushed into housing combination of easy money plus all the regulations, and we created this boom-bust cycle, and corruption, because corruption goes with it, because you don't have the same discipline. So we've got to stop all that.
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I've been blessed by learning certain principles and values that transformed my life and enabled me to accomplish more than I really had the ability to do or ever dream possible. And so I decided that I wanted to give as many other people as possible the opportunity to learn these ideas and transform their lives as I had.
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That's the first rule for anybody who controls - do no harm.
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I don't have all the answers. I have a lot of questions. And I have some basic principles.
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I believe that cronyism is nothing more than welfare for the rich and powerful, and should be abolished.
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What hermeneutics teaches is that progress comes from being exposed to different points of views because there's no point of view that is right for all situations and all times. And even if it's superior to the others, you can enrich it by drawing on others or thinking: "Why is that wrong and how do I improve my approach? How do I come up with a better approach?" So that's essential for innovation just like it is in technology.
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To do meaningful work is to contribute - to create value in society.
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A university shouldn't be a place of comfort. It should be a place of discomfort because you want to disabuse these kids of whatever prejudices or preconceptions they have when they come. You're trying to get them to think and develop, not be a Johnny-one-note.
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Embrace change. Envision what could be, challenge the status quo, and drive creative destruction.
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If people are teaching economics, they need to teach all the different disciplines, all the different schools in economics. They can't just teach one because then the person isn't equipped to deal with the economics profession.
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The Declaration of Independence was only partially applied for women and for certain immigrants such as the Chinese. And it wasn't applied to get rid of corporate welfare and cronyism. People who had special connections got special deals from the beginning. So all of those violations of what the Declaration of Independence expressed, have led to the problems we have today. So, the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons for seven generations, or much longer. Forever.
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Our vision controls the way we think and, therefore, the way we act the vision we have of our jobs determines what we do and the opportunities we see or don't see.
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My philosophy, one of the biggest enemies of future success is past success, because you become complacent, you become risk averse, and that's one of the things we try to drive here, and this is fundamental to this philosophy, and that's in this component change, and also in value creation. That we need to drive creative destruction, not just incremental innovations, but innovations that will change the whole nature of the business.
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You've got to learn to work with others. One of my main values is, you learn this system of mutual benefit. That is, if you shirk and you try to make the other guy do more, he's going to do that to you.
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We try to reward people according to the value they create, value they create in society and for the company.
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My father told me "If you choose to let this money destroy your initiative and independence, then it will be a curse to you and my action in giving it to you will have been a mistake. I shall regret very much to have you miss the glorious feeling of accomplishment. Remember that often adversity is a blessing in disguise and is certainly the greatest character builder."
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When currying favor with Washington is seen as a much easier way to make money, businesses inevitably begin to compete with rivals in securing government largess, rather than in winning customers.
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Being captive to quarterly earnings isn't consistent with long-term value creation. This pressure and the short term focus of equity markets make it difficult for a public company to invest for long-term success, and tend to force company leaders to sacrifice long-term results to protect current earnings.
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