Peter Thiel

"People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI."

"Every one of today's smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon."

"I believe that evolution is a true account of nature, but I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society."

"I had a good experience in college, but I don't think interdisciplinary education is something that's stressed very much at all. It's generally considered to be something of a bad idea."

"I think people in Europe are generally pessimistic about the future. They have low expectations; they're not working hard to change things. When you're a slacker with a pessimistic view of the future, you're likely to meet those expectations."

"It is true that you can say that death is natural, but it is also natural to fight death. But if you stand up and say this is a big problem, we should do something about this, that makes people very uncomfortable, because they've made their peace with death."

"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."

"Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human."

"Our society, the dominant culture doesn't like science. It doesn't like technology."

"The core problem in our society is political correctness."

"The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system. The next Larry Page won't start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't start a social network company. If you are copying these people, you are not learning from them."

"We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius."

"What is it about our society where anyone who does not have Asperger's gets talked out of their heterodox ideas?"