Peter Thiel Quotes

Author Image

Peter Thiel

Profession : Businessman

Birth : October 11, 1967

The model of the U.S. economy is that we are the country that does new things.

Peter Thiel

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.

Peter Thiel

Anti-aging is an extremely under-explored field.

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

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.

Peter Thiel

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.

Peter Thiel

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.

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

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.

Peter Thiel

I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it's something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn't compute with our existing educational system.

Peter Thiel

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.

Peter Thiel

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.

Peter Thiel

The millennial generation in the US is the first that has reduced expectations from those of their parents. And I think there is something decadent and declinist about that.

Peter Thiel

I think society is both something that's very real and very powerful, but on the whole quite problematic.

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

From my perspective, I think the question of how we build a better future is an extremely important overarching question, and I think it's become obscured from us because we no longer think it's possible to have a meaningful conversation about the future.

Peter Thiel

One of my friends started a company in 1997, seven years before Facebook, called SocialNet. And they had all these ideas, and you could be, like, a cat, and I'd be a dog on the Internet, and we'd have this virtual reality, and we would just not be ourselves. That didn't work because reality always works better than any fake version of it.

Peter Thiel

I did not want to write just another business book.

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

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.

Peter Thiel