Peter Thiel Quotes
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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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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.
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I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I'd like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit.
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The first question we would ask if aliens landed on this planet is not, 'What does this mean for the economy or jobs?' It would be, 'Are they friendly or unfriendly?'
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I would not describe myself as a super early adopter of consumer technology.
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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?
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I think society is both something that's very real and very powerful, but on the whole quite problematic.
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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.
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I believe, basically, that individual freedom is very important.
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There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.
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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.
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Every one of today's smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.
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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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Whenever I talk to people who founded a company, I often like to ask the prehistory questions 'When did you meet? How long have you been working before you started the company?' A bad answer is, 'We met at a networking event a week ago, and we started a company because we both want to be entrepreneurs.'
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I think it's a problem that we don't have more companies like Facebook. It shouldn't be the only company that's doing this well.
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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.
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I'm not a politician. But neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America.
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Airbnb is undervalued.
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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.
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We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius.
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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.
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People are worried about privacy, and its one of the reasons people are using a service like SnapChat.
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I believe that people are too complacent about technology.
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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.