Top 60 Peter Thiel Quotes

Whenever I talk to people who founded a company, I often like to ask the prehistory questions ‘When did you meet? How long have you been working before you started the company?’ A bad answer is, ‘We met at a networking event a week ago, and we started a company because we both want to be entrepreneurs.’

I believe that evolution is a true account of nature, but I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society.

Facebook succeeded because it was about real people having a presence on the Internet. There were all these other social networking sites people had, but they were all about fictional people.

We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius.

You become a great writer by writing.

People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.

The core problem in our society is political correctness.

You don’t want to just do ‘me too’ companies that are copying what others are doing.

Technologies like PayPal foster competition because they enable people to shift their funds from one jurisdiction to another, and I think that ultimately will lead to a world in which there’s less government power and therefore more individual control.

Most of ‘big data’ is a fraud because it is really ‘dumb data.’

Credentials are critical if you want to do something professional. If you want to become a doctor or lawyer or teacher or professor, there is a credentialing process. But there are a lot of other things where it’s not clear they’re that important.

It is true that you can say that death is natural, but it is also natural to fight death. But if you stand up and say this is a big problem, we should do something about this, that makes people very uncomfortable, because they’ve made their peace with death.

All of us have to work toward a definite future… that can motivate and inspire people to change the world.

I worked at a law firm in New York very briefly.

When I was starting out, I followed along the path that seemed to be marked out for me – from high school to college to law school to professional life.

When parents have invested enormous amounts of money in their kids’ education, to find their kids coming back to live with them – well, that was not what they bargained for.

Contrarian thinking doesn’t make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up.

Creating value isn’t enough – you also need to capture some of the value you create.

College gives people learning and also takes away future opportunities by loading the next generation down with debt.

Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away.

Every one of today’s smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.

Seventy percent of the planet is covered with water, and there’s so much we can be doing with oceans, and it was one of the frontiers that people have more or less abandoned.

I think people in Europe are generally pessimistic about the future. They have low expectations; they’re not working hard to change things. When you’re a slacker with a pessimistic view of the future, you’re likely to meet those expectations.

Technology just means information technology.

Ideally, I want us to be working on things where if we’re not working on them, they won’t happen; companies where if we don’t fund them they will not receive funding.

The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

I had a good experience in college, but I don’t think interdisciplinary education is something that’s stressed very much at all. It’s generally considered to be something of a bad idea.

You can achieve difficult things, but you can’t achieve the impossible.

Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone.

I believe, basically, that individual freedom is very important.

A diploma is a dunce hat in disguise.

Our society, the dominant culture doesn’t like science. It doesn’t like technology.

Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human.

I believe that people are too complacent about technology.

Airbnb is undervalued.

If you borrowed money and went to a college where the education didn’t create any value, that is potentially a really big mistake.

Is there something about the gay experience, being gay and the gay experience, that pushes us even more than other people toward competition?

Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable.

I believe if we could enable people to live forever, we should do that. I think this is absolute.

I think it’s always good for gay people to come out, but it’s also understandable why people might choose not to do so.

Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices. Since it has no competition, it produces at the quantity and price combination that maximizes its profits.

If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That’s why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done.

There have been a lot of critiques of the finance industry’s having possibly foisted subprime mortgages on unknowing buyers, and a lot of those kinds of arguments are even more powerful when used against college administrators who are probably in some ways engaged in equally misleading advertising.

If you do something new, it will always look a little bit strange.

If you have a business idea that’s extremely easy to copy, that can often become something of a challenge or problem.

If you’re trying to develop a new drug, that costs you a billion dollars to get through the FDA. If you want to start a software company, you can get started with maybe $100,000.

Spiraling demand for resources of which our world contains a finite supply is the great long-term threat posed by globalisation. That is why we need new technology to relieve it.

I think what’s always important is not to be contrarian for its own sake but to really get at the truth.

I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically.

I spend an awful lot of time just thinking about what is going on in the world and talking to people about that. It’s probably one of my default social activities, just getting dinners with friends.

In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem.

I would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer.

In Silicon Valley, I point out that many of the more successful entrepreneurs seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger’s where it’s like you’re missing the imitation, socialization gene.

I think it’s a problem that we don’t have more companies like Facebook. It shouldn’t be the only company that’s doing this well.

I would not describe myself as a super early adopter of consumer technology.

I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I’d like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit.

I suspect Obama did not know he was recording Angela Merkel’s cell phones.

I did not want to write just another business book.

I don’t think success is complicated; if you do something that works, then it’s a success.

Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.