Peter Thiel Quotes
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Our society, the dominant culture doesn't like science. It doesn't like technology.
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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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College gives people learning and also takes away future opportunities by loading the next generation down with debt.
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I believe that people are too complacent about technology.
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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.
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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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We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius.
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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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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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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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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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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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There's absolutely no bubble in technology.
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The core problem in our society is political correctness.
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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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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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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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People are worried about privacy, and its one of the reasons people are using a service like SnapChat.
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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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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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You can achieve difficult things, but you can't achieve the impossible.
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If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That's why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done.
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As an undergraduate at Stanford, I started 'The Stanford Review,' which ended up being very engaged in the hot debates of the time: campus speech codes, questions about diversity on campus, all sorts of debates like that.
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There's no single right place to be an entrepreneur, but certainly there's something about Silicon Valley.