Peter Thiel Quotes
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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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There's absolutely no bubble in 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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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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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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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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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 would not describe myself as a super early adopter of consumer technology.
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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 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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I believe that people are too complacent about technology.
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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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The core problem in our society is political correctness.
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We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius.
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Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.
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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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I suspect Obama did not know he was recording Angela Merkel's cell phones.
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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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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 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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You can achieve difficult things, but you can't achieve the impossible.
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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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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.