Peter Thiel Quotes
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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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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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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 would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer.
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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 believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years - part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.
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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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There's absolutely no bubble in 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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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.
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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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The core problem in our society is political correctness.
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I would not describe myself as a super early adopter of consumer technology.
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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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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 suspect Obama did not know he was recording Angela Merkel's cell phones.
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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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If you do something new, it will always look a little bit strange.
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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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I did not want to write just another business book.
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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.