Top 242 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Thiel - Page 2

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

As an undergraduate at Stanford, I started 'The Stanford Review,' which ended up being very engaged in the hot debates of the time: campus speech codes, questions about diversity on campus, all sorts of debates like that.

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

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.

You will never build a company on the scale of a Facebook or a Google if you sell it along the way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Great investments may look crazy but really may not be.

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

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

Every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.

Airbnb is undervalued.

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

Don't bother starting the 10,000th restaurant in Manhattan. Find something to do that if you don't do it, it won't get 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.

I'm not a politician. But neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America.

I suspect if people live a lot longer they would be retired for a somewhat longer period of time. Just the financial planning takes on a very different character.

Unsolved problems are where you'll find opportunity. Energy is one sector with extremely urgent unsolved problems.

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

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

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

There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.

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.

I believe that people are too complacent about technology.

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

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

The big challenge with Internet financial services has been that it's very difficult to get large numbers of customers to sign up for your service.

There's no single right place to be an entrepreneur, but certainly there's something about Silicon Valley.

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

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.

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.

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

What is it about our society where anyone who does not have Asperger's gets talked out of their heterodox ideas?

The optimism that many felt in the 1960s over labour-saving technology is giving way to a fearful question: 'Will your labour be good for anything in the future? Or will you be replaced by a machine?'

We protect monopolies with copyright.

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.

My hope is that we're going to end up with a far more tolerant society, where the erosion of privacy, to the extent it erodes, will be offset by increased tolerance.

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

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

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.

The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present - and that's not fully valued.

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

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

You become a great writer by writing.

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?

If the whole U.S. was like Silicon Valley, we'd be in good shape. But now, the entire U.S. is not driven by technology, is not driven by innovation.

Anti-aging is an extremely under-explored field.

One of my first investments was $100,000 in a Web-based calendar startup - and I lost every dollar.

An entrepreneur must deal with more uncertainty than a professional with a well-defined role.

The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present.

EVERY MOMENT IN business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

Competition is overrated. In practice it is quite destructive and should be avoided wherever possible. Much better than fighting for scraps in existing markets is to create and own new ones.

Today's 'best practices' lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.

Every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.

The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.

Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.