Peter Thiel Quotes

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Peter Thiel

Profession : Businessman

Birth : October 11, 1967

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.

Peter Thiel

Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.

Peter Thiel

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.

Peter Thiel

Monopolies are bad and deserve their reputation when things are static and the monopolies function as toll collectors... But I think they're quite positive when they're dynamic and do something new.

Peter Thiel

When people use the word 'science,' it's often a tell, like in poker, that you're bluffing.

Peter Thiel

In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today.

Peter Thiel

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.

Peter Thiel

I'm very pro-science and pro-technology; I believe that these have been key drivers of progress in the world in the last centuries.

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

My only claim is that not all talented people should go to college and not all talented people should do the exact same thing.

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

A conventional truth can be important - it's essential to learn elementary mathematics, for example - but it won't give you an edge. It's not a secret.

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create.

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

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.

Peter Thiel

Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced, and there must be an intense belief in it.

Peter Thiel

I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years - part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

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.

Peter Thiel