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I worked at a law firm in New York very briefly.
Peter Thiel
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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?
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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There's always a sense that people will do things quite differently if they think they have privacy.
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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You become a great writer by writing.
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable.
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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Every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create.
Peter Thiel
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I suspect if people live a lot longer they would be retired for a somewhat longer period of time. Just the financial planning takes on a very different character.
Peter Thiel
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I would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer.
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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I believe if we could enable people to live forever, we should do that. I think this is absolute.
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
