George W. Bush Quotes

The civilized world is far ahead of us. We have no choice but to catch up.

We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.

China has lunged into the 21st century, while India is still lurching toward it.

Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.

The history of economic growth is the history of people making more with less and shifting into new jobs that were unheard of in the previous generation.

America…could within twenty years bring us to a degree of development which Turks, left to themselves, would not be able to achieve in a century. It would make Turkey prosperous, rich and happy and turn Turks into a strong and civilized nation.

The market economy itself was not a product of violent action—of revolutions—but of a series of gradual peaceful changes. The implications of the term “industrial revolution” are utterly misleading.

Instead of the scream of a fish hawk scaring the fishes, is heard the whistle of the steam-engine, arousing a country to its progress.

The '80s was the time for the great so-called modernization in Spain. It was a moment when it seemed that everything was breaking up and moving fast into modernity.

Openness has been vital to Asia's fast growth in the past and it will continue to be crucial for the area's further development.

The truth is, of course, that history is not completed in modern commerce any more than philosophy is perfected in political economy. In other words, there is nothing timeless or God-given about filling stations and penicillin and plastic bags.

Science is inextricably linked to our economy. It has been for the last 50 years and it will be for the next 50 years.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draw all, even the most barbarian of nations into civilization.

The future of a Nation will be shaped by its ability to produce planes, cars, electronics ... not by how slick its financial markets can shuffle paper assets around.

20 centuries of progress have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account and a high opinion of himself but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment.

In our State the locomotive has waked up the sleeping energies of a great people, and is transforming wasted fields into blooming gardens, and arousing men and women from the dull and heavy sleep that dwells with satisfaction upon the past, into the bright intelligence that looks to a glorious future ….

I'm not happy exporting jobs but we must move ahead in technology and patents. I don't like losing any jobs but we'll see new opportunities created selling products there. We'll have a net increase in economic activity, just as we did with free trade. It's tempting to want to protect our markets and stay closed. But at some point it all comes crashing down and you're hopelessly left behind. Then you are Russia.

The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process.

Tell me how poor Ireland, exhausted and drained of her life-blood at every pore, with a population almost wholly agricultural and unused to mechanical pursuits, is to establish new factories, and where she is to find the customers to keep them going. She cannot create new markets. This world is only limited after all, and the nations of Europe are pushing their way into its remote corners so rapidly that in a few years time, at most, the entire world will have been exhausted as a market ...

The economic development of industrial society tends inevitably to the ruin of small industries.

Without a consumer society there was no need for an industrial revolution.

We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.

Ideas are what power our economy.

The Chinese and the Americans are great peoples. The Americans are optimistic, full of enterprising drive, down to earth, and innovative. In just over 200 years, they have turned the United States into the most developed country in the world, and made phenomenal achievements in economic development and science and technology.

Over the last three decades, Mexico has made the transition from a commodity and agricultural-based economy to one dominated by manufacturing and services.