Quotes from Peter Thiel

From my perspective, I think the question of how we build a better future is an extremely important overarching question, and I think it's become obscured from us because we no longer think it's possible to have a meaningful conversation about the future.

The future is limitless.

Great things happen only once.

If people were super-optimistic about technology there would be no reason to be pessimistic about the future.

A lot of the key to Apple's succes is Designing technology in order to hide it.

Technology and capitalism are very much linked. I think that capitalism probably works best in a technologically progressing society.

Every time we create something new we go from zero to one.

You will never build a company on the scale of a Facebook or a Google if you sell it along the way.

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?

When people use the word 'science,' it's often a tell, like in poker, that you're bluffing.

By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready-for nothing in particular.

In the developed world, technological progress means that you can have a situation where there's growth, where there's a way in which everybody can be better off over time.

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.

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.

A diploma is a dunce hat in disguise.

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.

My hope is that we're going to end up with a far more tolerant society, where the erosion of privacy, to the extent it erodes, will be offset by increased tolerance.

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.

I do tend to think that things that have incredibly long time horizons often do involve market failures.

People are worried about privacy, and its one of the reasons people are using a service like SnapChat.

People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.

Our economy is broken. I'm not a politician, but neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America.

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?'

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.