Top 100 Peter Diamandis Quotes

In 1994, to motivate me to complete my pilot’s license, my good friend, Gregg Maryniak, gave me Charles Lindbergh’s autobiography of his solo flight across the Atlantic.

A dapper Canadian in his mid-fifties, Rob McEwen bought the disparate collection of gold mining companies known as Goldcorp in 1989. A decade later, he’d unified those companies and was ready for expansion – a process he wanted to start by building a new refinery.

Nothing gets us down more than watching violence on television or reading about war and brutality in the newspaper. The truth is, there’s a massive reduction in the amount of violence around the world.

My feeling is that if you can make a big impact on the global literacy problem, you can uplift a big portion of society.

Private companies should be building businesses.

If the idea is really new and unique and big, other people will all think it is bad and is going to fail.

The constant monitoring of our emotional landscape and personal interactions is a bizarre concept. But it is one that could help many people.

The goal of my work is to help assure that we can create a world of abundance in which we meet the basic needs of every man, woman and child.

So while I can’t tell you if bringing a child into this world is the morally-responsible to do, I can say that the future, much like the present, is going to be a whole lot better than you think.

3D printing will massively reduce the cost of certain products as the cost of labor is removed.

Today, we don’t blink an eye when the world’s wealthiest individuals donate enormous sums of money to charitable causes. In fact, we expect them to do so.

Eight billion people will have Internet access by 2020.

Now the amygdala is our early warning detector, our danger detector. It sorts and scours through all of the information looking for anything in the environment that might harm us. So given a dozen news stories, we will preferentially look at the negative news.

Because it’s cheaper and easier to fly than ever before, air travel is becoming democratized.

Online games for data-mining have a short virtual shelf life. People get bored, especially if the game seems stagnant.

The rate of innovation is a function of the total number of people connected and exchanging ideas. It has gone up as population has gone up. It’s gone up as people have concentrated in cities.

Imagine what we could do for the world’s grand challenges with a trillion hours of focused attention.

In 1980, it cost just under $600 to take a round-trip flight within the United States.

Even in an organization that’s doing something big and bold, there’s the mundane, day-to-day execution work of keeping it going. But people need to stay connected to the boldness, to the vision, and stay plugged in to the main vein of the dream.

At its core, bitcoin is a smart currency designed by very forward-thinking engineers. It eliminates the need for banks, gets rid of credit card fees, currency exchange fees, money transfer fees, and reduces the need for lawyers in transitions… all good things.

Gossip, in its earlier forms, contained information that was critical to survival because, in clans of 150, what happened to anyone had a direct impact on everyone.

In 1900, 180-plus out of every 1,000 African-American babies died.

Now, we connect via Skype or Google+ Hangout and see our friends’ and loved ones’ faces live.

Today, every skirmish in every part of the planet is broadcast straight into your living room live, in HD… over and over again.

The old newspaper adage, ‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ is as true today as it was a century ago.

In 1820, the average lifespan was just 26 years. Twenty-six years!

Old-style management is irrelevant.

Companies have too many experts who block innovation. True innovation really comes from perpendicular thinking.

One thing that humans still do better than computers is recognize images.

As you may know, I’m the co-founder and co-chairman of an asteroid company called Planetary Resources that is backed by a group of eight billionaires to implement the bold mission of extracting resources from near-Earth asteroids.

I think that we’re living in a time where there are trillion-dollar opportunities that never existed before.

Have an open mind – allow different ideas into your way of thinking.

Never before in history has the global marketplace touched so many consumers and provided access to so many producers.

Never tolerate a toxic person in your organization.

In the 1960s, 110 countries had averages of six or more children per family.

Nothing matters more than your health. Healthy living is priceless. What millionaire wouldn’t pay dearly for an extra 10 or 20 years of healthy aging?

In 1750, 75 percent of people on the planet worked to support the top 25 percent.

The challenge is that the day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea. And crazy ideas are very risky to attempt.

If you give people unlimited time and money, they’ll do things the same old way. But if they have to achieve the goal in a brief time, they’ll either give up or try something new.

As lower-cost phones begin to penetrate, they’ll become the educator and physician everywhere on the planet.

With sufficient water on the Moon, solar energy can be used to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen is, of course, critical for humans to breathe and the water important for us to drink.

Your mission is to find a product or service that can positively impact the lives of 1 billion people because that’s the game we’re playing today.

Today, the smartphone in your pocket has a high-quality digital camera. Everyone – not just artists – is a photographer, and the explosion of photos taken annually proves it.

I founded a launch company called International Microspace when I graduated medical school in 1989. We were trying to build a microsatellite launcher.

I think people are dreaming big because they have the tools to dream big. I hope that people are dreaming big because it makes them feel good about their lives.

Even a small village in the middle of Africa with a 3D printer will have access to any good it can download. The world of the ‘Star Trek’ replicator is not far away.

As humans, we have evolved to compete… it is in our genes, and we love to watch a competition.

Two-thirds of all growth takes place in cities because, by simple fact of population density, our urban spaces are perfect innovation labs. The modern metropolis is jam-packed. People are living atop one another; their ideas are as well.

Collective management will build companies – not top-down decision-making.

We are living toward incredible times where the only constant is change, and the rate of change is increasing.

From a scientific point of view, we now know that the water is interlaced with the lunar soil in many locations, perhaps as remnants of comet collisions with the lunar surface.

Human exploration is something that’s been going on for thousands of years, and the models that worked 500 years ago are likely to work again today.

If the government regulates against use of drones or stem cells or artificial intelligence, all that means is that the work and the research leave the borders of that country and go someplace else.

We’re now able to 3D print in 200 different materials, from titanium to rubber, plastic, glass, ceramic, leathers, and even chocolate.

We know from hard research that educated populations have lower growth rates, are more peaceful, and add to the global economy.

3D printing has digitized the entire manufacturing process.

I don’t think the space station is innovative. Going to the moon was innovative because we had no idea how to do it.

Space is an inspirational concept that allows you to dream big.

People need to understand how exponential technologies are impacting the business landscape. They need to do some future-casting and look at how industries are evolving and being transformed.

You might hear people decry the loss of privacy in today’s world, but radical transparency is dramatically reducing violence everywhere. Most violent things happen in the dark when no one’s watching, whether it’s an oppressive dictator or someone causing violence in the inner city.

The communications industry has been tremendously successful, but we need to build the railroads and the oil wells and the gold mines of space.

We live in a world bathed in 5,000 times more energy than we consume as a species in the year, in the form of solar energy. It’s just not in usable form yet.

Many people who try to do big bold things in the world find out it’s not about the money or the technology: It’s about the regulatory hurdles that will try and stop you.

When I talk about taking bold actions in the world, few things are bolder than creating the ‘Huffington Post’ from scratch and reinventing the newspaper business.

As I’ve conducted my interviews with crowdsourcing entrepreneurs and experts, it’s constantly hit me that your ability to do something big and bold is really a function of the size and quality of your crowd.