Peter Thiel Quotes

A culture that generates more backwardness with every generation.

Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.

When Americans are faced with the prospect that they can never earn their way to wealth, they have two choices: to rebel against the system, or to settle into depressed complacency.

History is moving the furniture around in the house of mankind just about everywhere but the U.S.A. Things have changed, except here, where people come and go through the rooms of state, and everything looks shabbier by the day, and lethargy eats away at the upholstery like an acid fog, and the walls reverberate with meaningless oratory.

Before the Second World War, I believed in the perfectability of social man; that a correct structure of society produced goodwill; and that, therefore, you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society. It is possible that I believe something of the same again; but after the war, I did not because I was unable to.

The surface of American life looks smooth, prosperous, peaceful. But underneath, fault-line shifts in family and work life have led us into what some have called 'advanced insecurity.'

I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

I think we've made tremendous progress on racism. We've even made progress on war. We've made almost no progress on poverty.

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

I think society is both something that's very real and very powerful, but on the whole quite problematic.

I'm not the kind of writer who's able to block out the world around me. I'm mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate.

Let us wage a moral and political war against the billionaires and corporate leaders, on Wall Street and elsewhere, whose policies and greed are destroying the middle class of America.

Saturdays and Sundays, America in the year 2009 does not in some ways differ significantly from the country that existed almost 50 years ago. This is truly sad.

The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.

This nation has always struggled with how it was going to deal with poor people and people of color. Every few years you will see some great change in the way that they approach this. We've had the war on poverty that never really got into waging a real war on poverty.

Trump lays bare a lot of things already wrong with our society. But he also accelerates the process of it becoming worse, when it could be getting better.

There's a great feeling of powerlessness in America. When I express ideas to people, they say, 'That's terrific, but do you think it really counts?'

From now back to the past, we can observe clearly that none of us is free.

But I think most importantly, we need to realize that not everyone is privileged or born into a good life, stable homes or a home, period.

Absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay.

Change is almost always negative. Things degenerate.

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

England is a country where people stay exactly as they are. The soul does not receive the slightest jolt.

Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution 'to each according to his merit or value.'