"There is, of course, an older Western tradition, a tradition that offered a less dogmatically economic view of human nature. That older account realized that not all people are so modest and lacking in ambition that they will content themselves, like Voltaire’s Candide, with cultivating their gardens. Instead, it recognized that humans are potentially evil or at least dangerous beings; and, while there are vast differences between the Christian virtues of Augustine and the pagan virtues of Machiavelli, neither thinker would have dared lose sight of the problematic nature of humanity." - Peter Thiel

"In Girard’s alternative account of these matters, the war of all against all culminates not in a social contract but in a war of all against one, as the same mimetic forces gradually drive the combatants to gang up on one particular person. The war continues to escalate and there is no rational stopping point, at least not until this person becomes the scapegoat whose death helps to unite the community and bring about a limited peace for the survivors." - Peter Thiel

From the Enlightenment on, modern political philosophy has been characterized by the abandonment of a set of questions that an earlier age had deemed central: What is a well-lived life? What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of the city and humanity? How does culture and religion fit into all of this? For the modern world, the death of God was followed by the disappearance of the question of human nature. This disappearance had many repercussions. If humans can be approximated as rational economic actors (and, ultimately, even Adam Smith and 192 Peter Thiel Karl Marx agree on this point), then those who seek glory in the name of God or country appear odd; but if such odd people are commonplace and capable of asserting themselves with explosive force, then the account of politics that pretends they do not exist needs to be reexamined. " - Peter Thiel

"Questions of virtue and the true religion henceforth would be decided by each sovereign. The sovereigns would agree to disagree. Inexorably, questions of virtue and religion became private questions; polite and respectable individuals learned not to talk about them too much, because they could lead to nothing but unproductive conflicts. " - Peter Thiel

"But ex post, one wonders how policymakers could have been so naive. Let us set aside the inconvenient fact that the wealth transfer apparatus never worked as advertised, so that the West’s wealth was largely squandered on white elephant projects, no real economic development took place, and even in the best of cases the money simply circulated back to the West, ending up in Swiss bank accounts held by Third World dictators. the perpetrators were upper-middle-class Saudi Arabians, often with college degrees and with great expectations. Their mastermind, Osama bin Laden, had inherited a fortune now worth an estimated $250 million, mostly made during the Saudi oil boom of the 1970s. Had he been born in America, bin Laden could have been a Rockefeller. " - Peter Thiel