Peter Thiel Quotes
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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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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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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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Our society, the dominant culture doesn't like science. It doesn't like 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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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 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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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.
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The core problem in our society is political correctness.
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There's absolutely no bubble in technology.
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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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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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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 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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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 people use the word 'science,' it's often a tell, like in poker, that you're bluffing.
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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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You can achieve difficult things, but you can't achieve the impossible.
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The model of the U.S. economy is that we are the country that does new things.
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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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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.