Peter Thiel

"Gay marriage can’t be a partisan issue because as long as there are partisan issues or cultural issues in this country, you’ll have trench warfare like on the western front in World War I. You’ll have lots of carnage and no progress."

"Confirm [the age of Apple is over]. We know what a smartphone looks like and does. Its not the fault of Tim Cook, but its not an area where there will be any more innovation."

"It’s good to test yourself and develop your talents and ambitions as fully as you can and achieve greater success; but I think success is the feeling you get from a job well done, and the key thing is to do the work."

"My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more. ... In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable."

"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters."

"[The media] never takes [Trump] seriously, but it always takes him literally. I think a lot of the voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously, but not literally."

"Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?" This question sounds easy because its straightforward. Actually, its very hard to answer. Its intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And its psychologically difficulty because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius."

"... the phenomenon of serial entrepreneurship would seem to call into question our tendency to explain success as the product of chance."

"Just as the legal attack on Microsoft was ending Bill Gatess dominance, Steve Jobss return to Apple demonstrated the irreplaceable value of a companys founder. In some ways, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were opposites. Jobs was an artist, preferred closed systems, and spent his time thinking about great products above all else; Gates was a businessman, kept his products open, and wanted to run the world. But both were insider/outsiders, and both pushed the companies they started to achievements that nobody else would have been able to match."

"I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself "libertarian." ... But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible... The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron."

"Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin wont make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg wont create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you arent learning from them. .... Unless they invest in the difficult task of creating new things, American companies will fail in the future no matter how big their profits remain today. What happens when weve gained everything to be had from fine-tuning the old lines of businesses that weve inherited? Unlikely as it sounds, the answer threatens to be far worse than the crisis of 2008. Todays "best practices" lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried."

"Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on everything Ive learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX. But while I have noticed many patterns, and I relate them here, this book offers no formula for success. The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how be innovative. Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places ..."