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.

Facebook succeeded because it was about real people having a presence on the Internet. There were all these other social networking sites people had, but they were all about fictional people.

An entrepreneur must deal with more uncertainty than a professional with a well-defined role.

I don't think success is complicated; if you do something that works, then it's a success.

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.

'Perfect competition' is considered both the ideal and the default state in Economics 101. So-called perfectly competitive markets achieve equilibrium when producer supply meets consumer demand.

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.

Technology just means information technology.

People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.

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.

From my perspective, I think the question of how we build a better future is an extremely important overarching question, and I think it's become obscured from us because we no longer think it's possible to have a meaningful conversation about the future.

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

Contrarian thinking doesn't make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up.

When people use the word 'science,' it's often a tell, like in poker, that you're bluffing.

Airbnb is undervalued.

The future is limitless.

Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.

A diploma is a dunce hat in disguise.

People always say you should live your life as if it were your last day. I think you should live your life as though it will go on for ever; that every day is so good that you don't want it to end.

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

You can achieve difficult things, but you can't achieve the impossible.

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.

Great things happen only once.

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.

The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present - and that's not fully valued.

Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create.

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?

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.

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.

The core problem in our society is political correctness.

The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

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