When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?
Monopolies are bad and deserve their reputation when things are static and the monopolies function as toll collectors... But I think they're quite positive when they're dynamic and do something new.
All of us have to work toward a definite future... that can motivate and inspire people to change the world.
Every one of today's smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.
I'm not a politician. But neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America.
A diploma is a dunce hat in disguise.
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.
When I moved to Cleveland, defense research was laying the foundations for the Internet. The Apollo program was just about to put a man on the moon - and it was Neil Armstrong, from right here in Ohio. The future felt limitless. But today, our government is broken.
My only claim is that not all talented people should go to college and not all talented people should do the exact same thing.
Airbnb is undervalued.
Whenever I talk to people who founded a company, I often like to ask the prehistory questions 'When did you meet? How long have you been working before you started the company?' A bad answer is, 'We met at a networking event a week ago, and we started a company because we both want to be entrepreneurs.'
How to teach people to do what hasn't been done is a great riddle.
You can achieve difficult things, but you can't achieve the impossible.
My hope is that we're going to end up with a far more tolerant society, where the erosion of privacy, to the extent it erodes, will be offset by increased tolerance.
In Silicon Valley, I point out that many of the more successful entrepreneurs seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger's where it's like you're missing the imitation, socialization gene.
Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away.
Spiraling demand for resources of which our world contains a finite supply is the great long-term threat posed by globalisation. That is why we need new technology to relieve it.
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.
If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That's why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done.
You don't want to just do 'me too' companies that are copying what others are doing.
