Peter Thiel Quotes
-
Great things happen only once.
-
One of my first investments was $100,000 in a Web-based calendar startup - and I lost every dollar.
-
I would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer.
-
Contrarian thinking doesn't make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up.
-
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.
-
The first question we would ask if aliens landed on this planet is not, 'What does this mean for the economy or jobs?' It would be, 'Are they friendly or unfriendly?'
-
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.
-
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.'
-
Every one of today's smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.
-
Great investments may look crazy but really may not be.
-
Airbnb is undervalued.
-
I think society is both something that's very real and very powerful, but on the whole quite problematic.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I believe, basically, that individual freedom is very important.
-
I don't think success is complicated; if you do something that works, then it's a success.
-
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.
-
I'm not a politician. But neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America.
-
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.
-
What is it about our society where anyone who does not have Asperger's gets talked out of their heterodox ideas?
-
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.
-
College gives people learning and also takes away future opportunities by loading the next generation down with debt.