The first question we would ask if aliens landed on this planet is not, 'What does this mean for the economy or jobs?' It would be, 'Are they friendly or unfriendly?'

I believe that people are too complacent about technology.

Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable.

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

There have been a lot of critiques of the finance industry's having possibly foisted subprime mortgages on unknowing buyers, and a lot of those kinds of arguments are even more powerful when used against college administrators who are probably in some ways engaged in equally misleading advertising.

I would consider myself a rather staunch libertarian.

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.

My only claim is that not all talented people should go to college and not all talented people should do the exact same thing.

Every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.

There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.

I believe if we could enable people to live forever, we should do that. I think this is absolute.

Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.

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.

In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem.

I think it's always good for gay people to come out, but it's also understandable why people might choose not to do so.

Most of 'big data' is a fraud because it is really 'dumb data.'

I think it's a problem that we don't have more companies like Facebook. It shouldn't be the only company that's doing this well.

Credentials are critical if you want to do something professional. If you want to become a doctor or lawyer or teacher or professor, there is a credentialing process. But there are a lot of other things where it's not clear they're that important.

One of my friends started a company in 1997, seven years before Facebook, called SocialNet. And they had all these ideas, and you could be, like, a cat, and I'd be a dog on the Internet, and we'd have this virtual reality, and we would just not be ourselves. That didn't work because reality always works better than any fake version of it.

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.

Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices. Since it has no competition, it produces at the quantity and price combination that maximizes its profits.

Unsolved problems are where you'll find opportunity. Energy is one sector with extremely urgent unsolved problems.

The optimism that many felt in the 1960s over labour-saving technology is giving way to a fearful question: 'Will your labour be good for anything in the future? Or will you be replaced by a machine?'

The model of the U.S. economy is that we are the country that does new things.

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.

You don't want to just do 'me too' companies that are copying what others are doing.

Great investments may look crazy but really may not be.

I spend an awful lot of time just thinking about what is going on in the world and talking to people about that. It's probably one of my default social activities, just getting dinners with friends.

All of us have to work toward a definite future... that can motivate and inspire people to change the world.

If you do something new, it will always look a little bit strange.

I would not describe myself as a super early adopter of consumer technology.

Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone.

I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years - part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.

I think society is both something that's very real and very powerful, but on the whole quite problematic.

A conventional truth can be important - it's essential to learn elementary mathematics, for example - but it won't give you an edge. It's not a secret.

Anti-aging is an extremely under-explored field.

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

You become a great writer by writing.

I would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer.

There's no single right place to be an entrepreneur, but certainly there's something about Silicon Valley.

Is there something about the gay experience, being gay and the gay experience, that pushes us even more than other people toward competition?

The millennial generation in the US is the first that has reduced expectations from those of their parents. And I think there is something decadent and declinist about that.

I'm not a politician. But neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America.

I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically.

In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today.

There's always a sense that people will do things quite differently if they think they have privacy.

I think what's always important is not to be contrarian for its own sake but to really get at the truth.

If you have a business idea that's extremely easy to copy, that can often become something of a challenge or problem.

When I was starting out, I followed along the path that seemed to be marked out for me - from high school to college to law school to professional life.

Seventy percent of the planet is covered with water, and there's so much we can be doing with oceans, and it was one of the frontiers that people have more or less abandoned.