American government is not dominated by engineers, it is dominated by lawyers. Engineers are interested in substance and building things; lawyers are interested in process and rights and getting the ideology correctly blended. And so there is sort of no really concrete plan for the future.

The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it.

There are only two kinds of businesses in this world: Businesses in crazy competition, and businesses that are one of a kind.

In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms—from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’ . . . We are in a deadly race between politics and technology. . . . The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.

Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.

If people were super-optimistic about technology there would be no reason to be pessimistic about the future.

Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it's much more important than free trade.