Peter Thiel

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.

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.

There's absolutely no bubble in technology.

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.

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.

What is it about our society where anyone who does not have Asperger's gets talked out of their heterodox ideas?

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.

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.

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.

Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.

The future is limitless.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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