Peter Thiel Quotes

Communications are better now than in my Vietnam days.

Compared even to the development of the phone or TV, the Web developed very quickly.

Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020.

Computers get better faster than anything else ever.

I'm a physicist, and we have something called Moore's Law, which says computer power doubles every 18 months. So every Christmas, we more or less assume that our toys and appliances are more or less twice as powerful as the previous Christmas.

My iPhone stays on. All my friends and family know that I hate the phone, so no one calls me on it. I just use it to play Words With Friends and take pictures of cute shoes.

We've seen the power of the PC, and we've seen that it's unstoppable.

It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.

Computer power grows according to Moore's law, as does the sophistication of handheld devices.

When I was in Japan on tour in 2010, I felt like I was 30 years into the future. I love technology and they are so advanced with their phones, computers, everything. I think they had the iPhone way before we did in the U.S. I love gadgets, games, social media and I try to stay ahead on all that stuff, but they get it all first.

The accumulated knowledge of materials, computing, electromagnetism, product design, and all the rest that we've learned over the last several centuries converts a few ounces of raw materials worth mere pennies into a device with more computing power than the entire planet possessed fifty years ago.

A typical smart phone has more computing power than Apollo 11 when it landed a man on the moon.

Our generation, unfortunately, is stuck to our phones - and, like, Twitter - constantly, which I have no problem with. I'd say we're not describing the children of America or anything like that, but there is something to take from it: It is kind of sad how we can't go thirty minutes without checking our phone.

I use my iPhone as an alarm, so when it goes off, I pick it up and casually scroll through whatever emails may have come in while I was asleep.

In 20 or 30 years, you'll be able to hold in your hand as much computing knowledge as exists now in the whole city, or even the whole world.

This revolution, the information revoultion, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It's very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt bulb to run it and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now?

Computers do the calculating to allow people to transform the world.

Each new generation builds on the work of the previous one, gaining new perspective. New verbs are introduced. We Google strange and dangerous places. We tweet mindlessly to the cosmos. We Facebook our own grandmothers. I, for one, don't want to be left behind.

When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web... Now even my cat has its own page.

My daughter's got a smartphone in her hand with roughly the same power as a mainframe circa 1982, and she's running around Beijing and wants an answer as fast as she can.

A big part of the success of Microsoft was that every year, the chips our software ran on got faster and cheaper. They doubled in capability every 18 months under Moore's law.

When you're directed by social media, I think it's very easy to lose a sense of agency. And you can see it when you go to any subway station, you walk down any street in a city, you will see 70-80 percent of people staring into their phones as they walk or stand.

We didn't even have email when I was in college.

If it weren't for Moore's law changing the playing field continuously, I would have been long gone. The rapid pace of hardware evolution still keeps things fresh for me.

A computer can be a useful and indispensable tool. But if we allow it to devour our time with vain, unproductive, and sometimes destructive pursuits, it becomes an entangling net.