Peter Thiel

“The early PayPal team worked well together because we were all the same kind of nerd. We all loved science fiction: Cryptonomicon was required reading, and we preferred the capitalist Star Wars to the communist Star Trek.”

“I thought I would try to double these three ideas up as a sort of a book review of a Gilder's terrific book Life After Google, so I'm gonna give you three contrarian ideas but I'm gonna weave in a little bit of a book review of a Life after Google as well.”

“There's a number of different books that Gerard wrote. I think the magisterial one is probably Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. It's sort of part psychology, part anthropology, part history.”

“The line I always like to quote is uh from Milton's Paradise Lost: the mind is its own place and of itself can make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell.”

“It's sort of an extreme writer but there's the Rushdooney book from 1963 that I think it was his best book.”

“Back in 1958, when new technologies such as the Boeing 707 really were changing the physical world around us, Leo Strauss had already pointed out an “appalling discrepancy” between the exactness of science itself and our seeming incapacity to evaluate its progress.”

“'If you don't use your freedom of speech, one day you might find that it's gone. Buy this book while it's legal.”

“The tax code leaves unanswered, of course, the question of why we allow foundations this privilege and this power. In The Legitimacy of Philanthropic Foundations, a recent collection of essays on the topic, the lead editor Kenneth Prewitt argues that private grantmaking foundations carry out a function no other institutions can perform. That uniqueness, however, is not immediately evident. After all, foundations redistribute wealth, support scientific and artistic endeavors, and seek to improve social conditions—all of which the government does as well. It is not, concludes Prewitt, what foundations do that makes them unique but what they represent: a Jeffersonian ideal, an American ­picture of individual freedom in service to moral ends.”

“There was this sort of hyperoptimistic book by Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near; we had all these sort of accelerating charts. I also disagree with that, not just because I’m more pessimistic, but I disagree with the vision of the future where all you have to do is sit back, eat popcorn, and watch the movie of the future unfold.”

“It was John Locke, in The Reasonableness of Christianity, said that Christ obviously had to mislead people, since if he had not done so, the authorities might have tried to kill him.”

“Their indefiniteness took different forms. Rawls begins A Theory of Justice with the famous "veil of ignorance": fair political reasoning is supposed to be impossible for anyone with knowledge of the world as it concretely exists.”

“I like the genre of past books written about the future, e.g.: Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis JJ Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge Norman Angell, The Great Illusion Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age”

“I like the genre of past books written about the future, e.g.: Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis JJ Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge Norman Angell, The Great Illusion Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age”

“I like the genre of past books written about the future, e.g.: Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis JJ Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge Norman Angell, The Great Illusion Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age”

“Sonia Arrison's "100 Plus" was first published in 2011, but its message is evergreen: how scientists are directly attacking the problem of aging and death and why we should fight for life instead of accepting decay as inevitable. The goal of longer life doesn't just mean more years at the margin; it means a healthier old age. There is nothing to fear but our own complacency.”

“Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands" is also just released in paperback. He tells how the Nazis and the Soviets drove each other to ever more murderous atrocities as they fought to dominate Eastern Europe in the 1930s and '40s. Even as he calculates the death toll painstakingly, Mr. Snyder reminds us that the most important number is one: Each victim was an individual whose life cannot be reduced to the violence that cut it short.”

“"Resurrection From the Underground," the great French thinker René Girard's classic study of Fyodor Dostoevsky, was reissued in paperback for the first time this year. There is no better way to think about human irrationality than to read Dostoevsky, and there is no better reader of Dostoevsky than Mr. Girard.”

“For a fresh application of Mr. Girard's insights into power politics, that great international theater of irrationality, try Jean-Michel Oughourlian's "Psychopolitics," a brief, freewheeling 2012 work by one of Mr. Girard's closest collaborators.”

“If you can get a university president (almost every one of whom is a boomer) to take stagnation seriously, you are likely to hear two talking points: First, we need to spend more money on education and research. Second, progress is harder now than it used to be because the “low-­hanging fruit” is all gone and we are up against the limits of nature. Douthat rejects these excuses. He maintains that more of the same is not enough, and stagnation is not a fate imposed by the universe. Choosing agency over boomer complacency, The Decadent Society sets the stakes for the most urgent public debate of the 2020s: How do we get back to the future?”