Peter Thiel Quotes
-
It is true that you can say that death is natural, but it is also natural to fight death. But if you stand up and say this is a big problem, we should do something about this, that makes people very uncomfortable, because they've made their peace with death.
-
I did not want to write just another business book.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
College gives people learning and also takes away future opportunities by loading the next generation down with debt.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I believe that people are too complacent about technology.
-
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?
-
In Silicon Valley, I point out that many of the more successful entrepreneurs seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger's where it's like you're missing the imitation, socialization gene.
-
When people use the word 'science,' it's often a tell, like in poker, that you're bluffing.
-
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.
-
I would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer.
-
The core problem in our society is political correctness.
-
Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.
-
There's absolutely no bubble in technology.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Most of 'big data' is a fraud because it is really 'dumb data.'
-
I would not describe myself as a super early adopter of consumer technology.
-
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.
-
People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.
-
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.