Interesting quote on investing

Paul Kedrosky, one of my favourite bloggers, picked out  a quote from Andy Rappaport of August Capital about social investing -- the idea that you can do good via investing in ethical funds.  Andy says:   

"A lot of socially responsible funds have this idea that they’ll provide a social return, but you’ll have to accept a below-average financial return. I disagree. Once you give a business an opportunity to make a below-average return, you make it more likely it will."

It kind of reminded me of one of my favourite quotations from Orson Welles, playing Harry Lime in the Third Man:

"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed; but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.

"In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce?

"The cuckoo clock."

You need friction and struggle to create genius and heroism.

It is risk versus reward ... the more you risk, the greater the rewards.