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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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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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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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Every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.
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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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The core problem in our society is political correctness.
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Contrarian thinking doesn't make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up.
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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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Great investments may look crazy but really may not be.
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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 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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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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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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The big challenge with Internet financial services has been that it's very difficult to get large numbers of customers to sign up for your service.
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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.
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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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There's no single right place to be an entrepreneur, but certainly there's something about Silicon Valley.
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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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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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I did not want to write just another business book.
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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.