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It is true that you can say that death is natural, but it is also natural to fight death. But if you stand up and say this is a big problem, we should do something about this, that makes people very uncomfortable, because they've made their peace with death.
Peter Thiel -
One of my friends started a company in 1997, seven years before Facebook, called SocialNet. And they had all these ideas, and you could be, like, a cat, and I'd be a dog on the Internet, and we'd have this virtual reality, and we would just not be ourselves. That didn't work because reality always works better than any fake version of it.
Peter Thiel
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When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?
Peter Thiel -
There's absolutely no bubble in technology.
Peter Thiel -
If you're trying to develop a new drug, that costs you a billion dollars to get through the FDA. If you want to start a software company, you can get started with maybe $100,000.
Peter Thiel -
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 -
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 -
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
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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 -
In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem.
Peter Thiel -
Airbnb is undervalued.
Peter Thiel -
I would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer.
Peter Thiel -
In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today.
Peter Thiel -
Contrarian thinking doesn't make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up.
Peter Thiel
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People are worried about privacy, and its one of the reasons people are using a service like SnapChat.
Peter Thiel -
Our society, the dominant culture doesn't like science. It doesn't like technology.
Peter Thiel -
Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create.
Peter Thiel -
I believe, basically, that individual freedom is very important.
Peter Thiel -
Facebook succeeded because it was about real people having a presence on the Internet. There were all these other social networking sites people had, but they were all about fictional people.
Peter Thiel -
The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.
Peter Thiel
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I think society is both something that's very real and very powerful, but on the whole quite problematic.
Peter Thiel -
Monopolies are bad and deserve their reputation when things are static and the monopolies function as toll collectors... But I think they're quite positive when they're dynamic and do something new.
Peter Thiel -
When I moved to Cleveland, defense research was laying the foundations for the Internet. The Apollo program was just about to put a man on the moon - and it was Neil Armstrong, from right here in Ohio. The future felt limitless. But today, our government is broken.
Peter Thiel -
We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius.
Peter Thiel