Peter Thiel Quotes

My generation will actually be the first generation that is tamer than the one that came before it, and it will probably be poorer; less fun and less money.

I would say basically the commonplace observation that kids aren't going to earn as much as their parents is now is a coin flip at this point. Are you going to do better than your parents? It's a 50-50 chance, whereas if you were born in the 1940s or 1950s, you had more than a 90 percent chance you were going to do better than your parents. So basically almost a guarantee for most kids that you were going to achieve the American Dream of doing better than your parents did. Today, that's certainly no longer the case.

Cleveland has a very bad reputation, but there's a lot of stuff that's left over from when there were very wealthy people - the Art Museum and a world class symphony that's still world class.

We're running out of rich people in this country.

Let's stop this American downward spiral.

I guess that's one of the things about growing up in the fifties - it never occurred to me that you wouldn't be at least as successful as your parents.

I believe that as we face unparalleled prosperity in some quarters and deep impoverishment in others, it is the willingness of the next generation to bridge the gap between the two that will return us to our sense of purpose and focus.

I think the rich will eventually have to cave in too, because the economic situation around the world is not gonna tolerate the United States being on top forever.

Italy is divided between us and them, rich and poor, north and south, young and old, employed and unemployed.

If I could distil the relevance of Bruce Springsteen's music to Australia it would be this: don't let what has happened to the American economy happen here. Don't let Australia become a down-under version of New Jersey, where the people and the communities whose skills are no longer in demand get thrown on the scrap heap of life.

A family may be ruined by extravagance, but it is not always through ruin that the representatives in a family are to be found in humble or comparatively humble circumstances, but that the junior members of a gentle family went into trade.

Russia is in the advanced stages of poverty.

There is one iron law of history. When a country’s economy starts to decline, if it continues to decline, it will lose its greatness.

Like Venice’s oligarchs, America’s super-rich are destroying the social mobility that creates wealth.

Elites that have prospered from inclusive systems can be tempted to pull up the ladder they climbed to the top. Eventually, their societies become extractive and their economies languish…. it is the danger America faces today, as the 1 percent pulls away from everyone else and pursues an economic, political and social agenda that will increase that gap even further — ultimately destroying the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place.

The hollowing out of the middle class is a problem common to all Western industrialized economies. Maybe we should work together to solve it.

My parents didn't have the opportunities they would have liked, but they didn't complain about that because they thought they were part of a society where the next generation would have those opportunities.

I think Millennials are more progressive, more socially progressive, much more concerned about economic issues that impact the poor and middle class, and so that basically shows me that the Democratic party will have a bright future.

At 80 million, millennials, born between 1980 and 2000, are the largest generation in history. Yet they are a demographic Congress has historically either taken for granted or ignored altogether.

You've got first-generation Americans here who are going to be poorer than their parents. That's never happened in the States before, and it's going to have massive social repercussions here.

I think that people have been looking at 40 years of flat wages. You know, the reality is you've got folks in diners and hair shops and barber shops all over this country who look at their own lives and think, you know, "My parents did better than I'm doing and my kids might not do as well as I'm doing." And that's because wages have been slashed for so long.

The neoliberal programs of the last generation have in fact been, and were intended to be, a pretty serious attack on democracy, but also they've led to stagnation or decline for large parts of the population - the working class, the lower middle class, these people have essentially been cast aside.

There is a reason people in America are disappointed and restless. If opportunity seems like it's been slipping away, that's because it has. And liberal progressive ideas have done exactly nothing to help.

The greatest problem America faces is the decline of middle class incomes.

I think people think their incomes have been flat lining for a long period of time. They feel that the next generation's opportunities are not going to be improvement. So and I also think that social media then allows insurgent movements to gain scale at speed.