Peter Thiel Quotes
-
I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Great investments may look crazy but really may not be.
-
The core problem in our society is political correctness.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
There's absolutely no bubble in technology.
-
People are worried about privacy, and its one of the reasons people are using a service like SnapChat.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When people use the word 'science,' it's often a tell, like in poker, that you're bluffing.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
You can achieve difficult things, but you can't achieve the impossible.
-
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.
-
Ideally, I want us to be working on things where if we're not working on them, they won't happen; companies where if we don't fund them they will not receive funding.