Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes

Intellectual capital will always trump financial capital.

In a world of commoditized knowledge, the returns go to the companies who can produce non-standard knowledge.

Where the quest for knowledge is relatively, and now almost absolutely, unrestrained, the public benefit will be great, especially where the certainty of the law ensures that knowledge is rewarded. This is exactly the combination that is the foundation of wealth-creation.

In this 21st century world, some of our country's most significant exports and imports extend beyond goods and services: They also include innovation, knowledge, discovery, and healing.

The margin for making mistakes has gotten much smaller. In a commodity economy, it's hard to kill off your business. You still have the mine. You still have oil wells. You can always rebuild. In a knowledge economy, if you make a mistake, you're in trouble.

In a knowledge economy, natural selection favors organizations that can most effectively harness and coordinate collective intellectual energy and creative capacity.

What is the engine that drives economic growth in an ideopolis? The university.

Before all else, the modern university is a business selling a product.

Capitalism does not require us to hold a particular set of cognitive beliefs; it only requires that we act as if certain beliefs (about money, commodities etc) are true. The rituals are the beliefs, beliefs which, at the level of subjective self-description, may well be disavowed.

Capitalism is an art form.

Smith, as we have said, was not the proponent of any one class. He was a slave to his system. His whole economic philosophy stemmed from his unquestioning faith in the ability of the market to guide the system to its point of highest return. The market — that wonderful social machine — would take care of society's needs if it was left alone. "Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production," he wrote.

Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning.

Writers in a profit making economy are an exploitable commodity whose works are products to be marketed, and are so judged and handled.

Knowledge is our most powerful engine of production.

Ideas are the currency of the new economy.

What a country wants to make it richer is never consumption, but production. Where there is the latter, we may be sure that there is no want of the former. To produce, implies that the producer de_sires to consume; why else should he give himself useless labor? He may not wish to consume what he himself produces, but his motive for producing and selling is the desire to buy. Therefore, if the producers generally produce and sell more and more, they certainly also buy more and more.

Capitalism has brought with it progress, not merely in production but also in knowledge.

Literacy is the most basic currency of the knowledge economy.

The [liberals] consider profits as objectionable. The very existence of profits is in their eyes a proof that wage rates could be raised without harm to anybody. They speak of profit without dealing with loss. Profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all business activities. A profitable enterprise tends to expand; an unprofitable one tends to shrink. The elimination of profit renders production rigid and abolishes the consumer's control.

Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.

We thus begin to see that the institutionalized practice of citations and references in the sphere of learning is not a trivial matter. While many a general reader-that is, the lay reader located outside the domain of science and scholarship-may regard the lowly footnote or the remote endnote or the bibliographic parenthesis as a dispensable nuisance, it can be argued that these are in truth central to the incentive system and an underlying sense of distributive justice that do much to energize the advancement of knowledge.

Knowledge is the source of Wealth. Applied to tasks we already know, it becomes Productivity. Applied to tasks that are new, it becomes Innovation.

In the knowledge economy everyone is a volunteer, but we have trained our managers to manage conscripts.

No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.