Peter Thiel Quotes
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Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone.
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Is there something about the gay experience, being gay and the gay experience, that pushes us even more than other people toward competition?
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Every time you write an email, it is in the public domain. There are all these ways where security is not as good as people believe.
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If the whole U.S. was like Silicon Valley, we'd be in good shape. But now, the entire U.S. is not driven by technology, is not driven by innovation.
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Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.
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I think competition can make people stronger at whatever it is they're competing on. If we're competing in some athletic event for competitive swimmers, really intensely competing, it's likely that both of us will become better, but it's also quite possible we'll lose sight of what's truly valuable.
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There's always a sense that people will do things quite differently if they think they have privacy.
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You become a great writer by writing.
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From my perspective, I think the question of how we build a better future is an extremely important overarching question, and I think it's become obscured from us because we no longer think it's possible to have a meaningful conversation about the future.
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The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system. The next Larry Page won't start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't start a social network company. If you are copying these people, you are not learning from them.
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I spend an awful lot of time just thinking about what is going on in the world and talking to people about that. It's probably one of my default social activities, just getting dinners with friends.
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People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.
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My only claim is that not all talented people should go to college and not all talented people should do the exact same thing.
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I think people in Europe are generally pessimistic about the future. They have low expectations; they're not working hard to change things. When you're a slacker with a pessimistic view of the future, you're likely to meet those expectations.
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Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable.
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When I was starting out, I followed along the path that seemed to be marked out for me - from high school to college to law school to professional life.
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I would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer.
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I'm very pro-science and pro-technology; I believe that these have been key drivers of progress in the world in the last centuries.
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The optimism that many felt in the 1960s over labour-saving technology is giving way to a fearful question: 'Will your labour be good for anything in the future? Or will you be replaced by a machine?'
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One of my first investments was $100,000 in a Web-based calendar startup - and I lost every dollar.
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Spiraling demand for resources of which our world contains a finite supply is the great long-term threat posed by globalisation. That is why we need new technology to relieve it.
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What is it about our society where anyone who does not have Asperger's gets talked out of their heterodox ideas?
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Technologies like PayPal foster competition because they enable people to shift their funds from one jurisdiction to another, and I think that ultimately will lead to a world in which there's less government power and therefore more individual control.
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Great things happen only once.