Peter Thiel
We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius.Collection: Courage
Investors are always biased to invest in things they themselves understand. So venture capitalists like Uber because they like driving in black town cars. They don't like Airbnb because they like staying in five-star hotels, not sleeping on people's couches.Collection: Car
I think people in Europe are generally pessimistic about the future. They have low expectations; they're not working hard to change things. When you're a slacker with a pessimistic view of the future, you're likely to meet those expectations.Collection: Future
Credentials are critical if you want to do something professional. If you want to become a doctor or lawyer or teacher or professor, there is a credentialing process. But there are a lot of other things where it's not clear they're that important.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Death
Technology just means information technology.Collection: Technology
College gives people learning and also takes away future opportunities by loading the next generation down with debt.Collection: Learning
The optimism that many felt in the 1960s over labour-saving technology is giving way to a fearful question: 'Will your labour be good for anything in the future? Or will you be replaced by a machine?'Collection: Technology
I believe that people are too complacent about technology.Collection: Technology
If the whole U.S. was like Silicon Valley, we'd be in good shape. But now, the entire U.S. is not driven by technology, is not driven by innovation.Collection: Technology
When parents have invested enormous amounts of money in their kids' education, to find their kids coming back to live with them - well, that was not what they bargained for.Collection: Education
I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I'd like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit.Collection: Peace
There's absolutely no bubble in technology.Collection: Technology
Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.Collection: Future
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.Collection: Computers
Spiraling demand for resources of which our world contains a finite supply is the great long-term threat posed by globalisation. That is why we need new technology to relieve it.Collection: 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.Collection: Society
The future is limitless.Collection: Future
Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced, and there must be an intense belief in it.Collection: Education
Our society, the dominant culture doesn't like science. It doesn't like technology.Collection: Technology
People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.Collection: Intelligence
People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.Collection: Change
It's good to test yourself and develop your talents and ambitions as fully as you can and achieve greater success; but I think success is the feeling you get from a job well done, and the key thing is to do the work.Collection: Success
I would not describe myself as a super early adopter of consumer technology.Collection: Technology
Every one of today's smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.Collection: Computers
There have been a lot of critiques of the finance industry's having possibly foisted subprime mortgages on unknowing buyers, and a lot of those kinds of arguments are even more powerful when used against college administrators who are probably in some ways engaged in equally misleading advertising.Collection: Finance
The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system. The next Larry Page won't start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't start a social network company. If you are copying these people, you are not learning from them.Collection: Learning
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.Collection: Positive
When people use the word 'science,' it's often a tell, like in poker, that you're bluffing.Collection: Science
Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create.
I worked at a law firm in New York very briefly.
Seventy percent of the planet is covered with water, and there's so much we can be doing with oceans, and it was one of the frontiers that people have more or less abandoned.
You will never build a company on the scale of a Facebook or a Google if you sell it along the way.
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.
A diploma is a dunce hat in disguise.
'Perfect competition' is considered both the ideal and the default state in Economics 101. So-called perfectly competitive markets achieve equilibrium when producer supply meets consumer demand.
Most of 'big data' is a fraud because it is really 'dumb data.'
People are worried about privacy, and its one of the reasons people are using a service like SnapChat.
All of us have to work toward a definite future... that can motivate and inspire people to change the world.
I suspect Obama did not know he was recording Angela Merkel's cell phones.
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.
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.
We protect monopolies with copyright.
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.
The first question we would ask if aliens landed on this planet is not, 'What does this mean for the economy or jobs?' It would be, 'Are they friendly or unfriendly?'
Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone.
I think competition can make people stronger at whatever it is they're competing on. If we're competing in some athletic event for competitive swimmers, really intensely competing, it's likely that both of us will become better, but it's also quite possible we'll lose sight of what's truly valuable.
There's no single right place to be an entrepreneur, but certainly there's something about Silicon Valley.
I spend an awful lot of time just thinking about what is going on in the world and talking to people about that. It's probably one of my default social activities, just getting dinners with friends.
I believe if we could enable people to live forever, we should do that. I think this is absolute.