Peter Thiel Quotes

Debt and revolution are inseparable as cause and effect.

The United States economy is like a poker game where the chips have become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and where the other fellows can stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit runs out the game will stop.

As capitalism falters, the rich move their money out of the country, violence increases, and politicians promising prosperity are elected.

When 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why. And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time, and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.

The more dynamic the capitalistic expansion, the greater the disparity. It is from the disparity that we are going to get all the political upheaval for the next few years.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt.

In economic panics throughout history, the wiping out of the savings accounts of lower earners and the middle class has often led to social revolution, sometimes violent upheavals.

The capitalist system is about taking from the Earth and from the other great commodity, labour. What's happening with this system is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and the only way out of it is supposed to be growth. But growth is debt. It's going to make the situation worse.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Restrict the right of the rich to buy up any anything and everything, and then to exercise a kind of monopoly.

… there is inherent in the dynamics of capitalism a natural and destabilizing tendency toward inequality of income, wealth and opportunity.

The argument that any income redistribution is tantamount to socialism, and that socialism has always been unAmerican, has helped legitimise keeping taxes on America's very wealthy very low.

Everyday people are graduating from universities with crippling debt, stifling their opportunity for financial mobility, that is what's broken with this country.

By definition, design, and practice, capitalism is a system that concentrates economic power in the hands of the few to the exclusion of the many.

I think for a lot of young people there is a sense that maybe the future is not going to be everything it was held out to be, especially if they're coming out with a lot of student debt.

The fact that younger people are more inclined to socialism may well come with the fact that so many young people's first experience with capitalism is as a debtor.

In the time of the robber barons, my great grandfather insisted on reinvesting and sharing profits with workers... He was told he was a socialist, that he was not welcome on Wall Street.

The trouble with capitalism as a system is that only those who have or can get capital can make it work for them, and that leaves out damn near all of us.

Student loan debt is certainly not a fitting topic for a commencement speech, but it's an issue we must confront - not only for thousands of college graduates who deserve a fair shot, but also for our economy.

The old-fashioned idea is that responsibility falls upon those who borrow and lend. Money was not borrowed by campesinos, assembly plant workers, or slum-dwellers. The mass of the population gained little from borrowing, indeed often suffered grievously from its effects.

No 22-year-old should have to enter the real world already in a virtual debtors' prison.

Working families spend about 90 percent of their income on consumption - buying stuff. The rich spend less than 45 percent.

Crippling student loan debt doesn't just affect those who took out loans to get an education. It harms all of us because we can't have a healthy economy without a strong middle class to stimulate it.

We live in a world where there is so much wealth. There shouldn't be a homeless person. That's crazy.