Peter Thiel Quotes
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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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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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I believe if we could enable people to live forever, we should do that. I think this is absolute.
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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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I think it's always good for gay people to come out, but it's also understandable why people might choose not to do so.
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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.
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The big challenge with Internet financial services has been that it's very difficult to get large numbers of customers to sign up for your service.
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Great investments may look crazy but really may not be.
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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.
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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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Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away.
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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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There's absolutely no bubble in technology.
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I believe that evolution is a true account of nature, but I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society.
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The core problem in our society is political correctness.
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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.
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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.
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When people use the word 'science,' it's often a tell, like in poker, that you're bluffing.
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I had a good experience in college, but I don't think interdisciplinary education is something that's stressed very much at all. It's generally considered to be something of a bad idea.
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A conventional truth can be important - it's essential to learn elementary mathematics, for example - but it won't give you an edge. It's not a secret.
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The millennial generation in the US is the first that has reduced expectations from those of their parents. And I think there is something decadent and declinist about that.
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You can achieve difficult things, but you can't achieve the impossible.
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Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human.
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The model of the U.S. economy is that we are the country that does new things.