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Charles Koch

Charles Koch Quotes

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Famous Charles Koch Quotes

“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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“My father announced early on that he didn't want his sons to be "country club bums." And for a number of reasons, I bore the brunt of that - I have an older brother and two younger brothers. So he had me work in all my spare time. I started out picking dandelions, shoveling stalls, milking cows, building a fence - whatever dirty job was out there. That's a big deal, because you learn things working that you don't learn in school.”

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“I didn't think I was good at anything, didn't do well in school. And then in the third grade, I was going to a public school. And the teacher was putting math problems on the board. And I said to myself - it's amazing how you can remember certain incidents at any age that made an impression - I asked myself why is she putting those up when the answers are obvious. And then I saw it wasn't obvious to anybody else in the class. So I said, "Hey, I'm good at something."”

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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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“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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“My view on well-being and fulfillment comes from Maslow and positive psychology, and that is that you're satisfying three sets of needs. First need is physiological and safety needs: Got to satisfy those first. And the second is you got to satisfy your community needs because we're social animals, and if we don't have that, we're empty and we don't have people to share knowledge and bounce things off of, and challenge ourselves. And then the third is the idea is to find a calling.”

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“I love to try to understand first principles and be guided by that. But then, enrich them, because they won't last forever, just like everybody thought Newton had all the answers. And you probably read that, in the last of the 19th century, Harvard and others were discouraging people from going into physics because we have all the answers. And right after that, of course - we have - all this stuff is thrown out the window. And now we have whole new answers.”

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“People are interested in certain ideas, in certain periods, and then that moves, and okay, now people are more interested in studying this, and there is no perfect balance, and how would you know what the perfect balance is? I mean, what does it mean to have too many Beethoven chairs and too few Stravinsky chairs? I mean, that's kind of a value judgment that isn't really based on humility. We don't know what the optimum number is, so let people figure this out on their own. People are more interested in Beethoven than Stravinsky? Great! Why would that bother me?”

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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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“In America, I think we just keep adding, and that's our problem. We almost never subtract. We keep adding these boondoggles, and these violations of the basic principles of equal rights - certain people have more rights than others - it's like "Animal Farm." The pig says that we all have equal rights, but some have more rights than others.”

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