“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.” Peter Thiel
“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.” Peter Thiel
“[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.” Peter Thiel
“Confirm [the age of Apple is over]. We know what a smartphone looks like and does. It's not the fault of Tim Cook, but it's not an area where there will be any more innovation.” Peter Thiel
“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.” Peter Thiel
“... the phenomenon of serial entrepreneurship would seem to call into question our tendency to explain success as the product of chance.” Peter Thiel
“By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check.” Ben Horowitz
“It helps to have founded and run a company if you're going to help somebody run a company who is a founder.” Ben Horowitz
“The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.” Ben Horowitz
“Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.” Ben Horowitz
“Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.” Ben Horowitz
“The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges -- the single best book I have found on who we are and how we got here.” Marc Andreessen
“The best thing software can be is easy, but the way to do this is to get the defaults right, not to limit users' choices.” Paul Graham
“Software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software. If you can't design software as well as implement it, don't start a startup.” Paul Graham
“At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.” Paul Graham
“If you try to solve a hard problem, the question is not whether you will use a powerful enough language, but whether you will (a) use a powerful language, (b) write a de facto interpreter for one, or (c) yourself become a human compiler for one.” Paul Graham
“As a rule of thumb, the more qualifiers there are before the name of a country, the more corrupt the rulers. A country called The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably the last place in the world you'd want to live.” Paul Graham
“A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of.” Paul Graham
“The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want.” Paul Graham
“I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up.” Paul Graham
“At any given time, there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers most want to work, and if you aren't one of them, you won't just have fewer great hackers, you'll have zero.” Paul Graham
“Google never did any advertising. They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they know better than to use it themselves.” Paul Graham
“European public opinion will apparently tolerate people being fired in industries where they really care about performance. Unfortunately the only industry they care enough about so far is soccer.” Paul Graham
“Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.” Paul Graham
“Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.” Paul Graham
“While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.” Paul Graham
“If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies.” Paul Graham
“The other thing that's different about the real world [compared to high school] is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together.” Paul Graham
“Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world.” Paul Graham
“There's no switch inside you [high school students] that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age.” Paul Graham
“It's not so important what you [high school students] work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.” Paul Graham
“The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.” Paul Graham
“The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-B procrastination [putting off important things to do unimportant things], because it doesn't feel like procrastination. You're "getting things done." Just the wrong things.” Paul Graham
“If you work on something you can finish in a day or two, you can expect to have a nice feeling of accomplishment fairly soon. If the reward is indefinitely far in the future, it seems less real.” Paul Graham
“Another reason people don't work on big projects is, ironically, fear of wasting time. What if they fail? Then all the time they spent on it will be wasted. (In fact it probably won't be, because work on hard projects almost always leads somewhere.)” Paul Graham
“I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you.” Paul Graham
“The first type of judgement is the type where judging you is the end goal... But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is only a means to something else.” Paul Graham
“The more you realize that most judgements are greatly influenced by random, extraneous factors—that most people judging you are more like a fickle novel buyer than a wise and perceptive magistrate—the more you realize you can do things to influence the outcome.” Paul Graham
“When central banks print a lot of money to relieve a crisis, buy stocks, gold, and commodities because their value will rise and the value of paper money will fall.” Ray Dalio
“Think for yourself to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true, and 3) what you should do to achieve #1 in light of #2 ... and do that with humility and open-mindedness so that you can consider the best thinking available to you.” Ray Dalio
“Make believability-weighted decisions. ...Operate by principles ... that are so clearly laid out that their principles can be easily assessed and you and others can see if you walk the talk.” Ray Dalio