Quotes from Peter Thiel

I think what's always important is not to be contrarian for its own sake but to really get at the truth.

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.

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.

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 don't think success is complicated; if you do something that works, then it's a success.

I would not describe myself as a super early adopter of consumer technology.

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.

Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.

'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.

We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius.

I do think Bitcoin is the first [encrypted money] that has the potential to do something like change the world.

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.

Google makes so much money that it's now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined.

All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.

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.

I believe that people are too complacent about technology.

I suspect Obama did not know he was recording Angela Merkel's cell phones.

I suspect if people live a lot longer they would be retired for a somewhat longer period of time. Just the financial planning takes on a very different character.

I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it's something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn't compute with our existing educational system.

Every one of today's smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.

The core problem in our society is political correctness.

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.

If you borrowed money and went to a college where the education didn't create any value, that is potentially a really big mistake.

If you have a business idea that's extremely easy to copy, that can often become something of a challenge or problem.