Peter Thiel Quotes

When thinking about the future, it is fashionable to be pessimistic. Yet the evidence unequivocally belies such pessimism. Over the past centuries, humanity's lot has improved dramatically - in the developed world, where it is rather obvious, but also in the developing world, where life expectancy has more than doubled in the past 100 years.

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

If you go back to 1800, everybody was poor. I mean everybody. The Industrial Revolution kicked in, and a lot of countries benefited, but by no means everyone.

All over the world, we're seeing access to food, clean water, education and healthcare improve; as a result, global innovation is rising as well.

Since the war [WWII], the world has been rushing forward at an unprecedented and exhilarating speed … Yet Britain lags behind, lacking the will or the plan which can bring this future within the reach of us all.

We live in a dynamic time, where the rate of change and the rate of innovation are very high. It’s not equal in all segments or sectors of the economy, but we are seeing a lot of innovation in certain sectors, and I expect that to continue.

I am keen to serve one-sixth of the world's population where the miracles of science and technology would multiply manifold for betterment of mankind.

The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today.

The prerequisite for more economic equality in the world is industrialization. And this is possible only through increased capital investment, increased capital accumulation.

In the final analysis, the progress of our civilization will be retarded if any large body of citizens falls behind. Without the help of thousands of others, any one of us would die, naked and starved.

If you believe that the developing world deserves the same standards of living that we do in the developed world, then to achieve that, they need resources. They need the metals and the minerals to build the industries and the buildings and so forth, and the energy.

Think for a moment of the great agents and engines of our civilization, and then think what shadowy ideas they all once were. The wheels of the steamship turned as swiftly as they do now, but as silent and unsubstantial as the motions of the inventor's thought; and in the noiseless loom of his meditation were woven the sinews of the printing-press, whose thunder shakes the world.

If you have technological progress, that will encourage more capitalist system. On the other hand, if you don't, if things are stalled, you end up with much more of a zero sum type thing, where there's no progress and basically everybody's gain is somebody else's loss.

Science is the engine of prosperity. But you'd never know it, listening to some of the politicians. They're lawyers and businessmen, not scientists. Lawyers and businessmen massage wealth; they don't create it.

Science really creates wealth and opportunity which did not exist before. Whereas the old order was based on competition, the new order of science makes possible, for the first time, a cooperative creative effort in which every one is the gainer and no one the loser.

Unless we increase our economy's productivity-its vitality and competitiveness-we will face pressure for increasing controls.

But we must admit the possibility that continued investigation and experience will bring us ever nearer to that solemn moment, when the first man will rise from earth by means of wings, if only for a few seconds, and mark that historical moment which heralds the inauguration of a new era in our civilization.

I call the age we are entering the creative age because the key factor propelling us forward is the rise of creativity as the primary mover of our economy.

We have made a huge amount of progress over the last 50 years by enabling trade, by enabling kind of collaboration and learning. And actually, in fact, when you look at your average 30-year-old today, they're much better off than a 30-year-old 20 years ago, 30 years ago, because of progress in technology and health care and all the rest of this.

The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to "grow" and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superceded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.

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

Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.

We are racing toward a world of abundance, and we are going to be increasing the quality of life for everyone on this planet. The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities.

The clustering of technological innovation in time and space helps explain both the uneven growth among nations and the rise and decline of hegemonic powers.

I don't believe [Africa] is ready to shift - and she needs to shift. So she needs to get the technology and she can only get that technology from the developed world.