[The author] has written the first true guide for protecting a startup from self-sabotage.

When I first read [Ayn Rand's books] in the late 80s, it felt pretty crazy. And in the last decades, it's in many ways felt much more correct.

It can sometimes seem as if one must learn everything old before one can try anything new. [The author] does a masterful job showing that is not the case; we are lucky to have him as a guide.

All happy families are alike, and all unhappy families are unhappy in their own special way.

The devil shows up in Stalinist Russia, [...] and gives everybody what they want, and everything goes haywire.

One of the books that tremendously influenced me when I started PayPal.

[The author] understands that strategy starts with invention. He can't tell you what to invent, but he can and does show what it takes for a new invention to become a valuable business.

Peter Thiel quoted this book to the author.

I like the genre of past books written about the future.

Accurately describes inequality in the past and present of countries like the United States.

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.

Sets the stakes for the most urgent public debate of the 2020s: How do we get back to the future?

We [followers of Girard], had sort of a sense that we had figured out the truth about the world in a way that nobody else did.

Peter [Thiel] would, at one point, pass me a copy of [this book], the book he had read as he’d mulled his options over.

Tells how the Nazis and the Soviets drove each other to ever more murderous atrocities as they fought to dominate Eastern Europe.

For a fresh application of Mr. Girard’s insights into power politics, that great international theater of irrationality.

I like the genre of past books written about the future.

The great French thinker René Girard’s classic study of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

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.

Said that Christ obviously had to mislead people, since if he had not done so, the authorities might have tried to kill him.

I like the genre of past books written about the future.

I like the genre of past books written about the future.

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 future depends on human action.

One of [Peter Thiel's] favorite novels.

The mind is its own place and of itself can make a hell of heaven, and a heaven of hell.

[The author's] best book.

Something in these pages planted itself deep into [Peter Thiel]’s mind when he first read it long ago.