Peter Thiel Quotes
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Contrarian thinking doesn't make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up.
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I believe that people are too complacent about technology.
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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.
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There's always a sense that people will do things quite differently if they think they have privacy.
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College gives people learning and also takes away future opportunities by loading the next generation down with debt.
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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.
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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.
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Great investments may look crazy but really may not be.
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When I moved to Cleveland, defense research was laying the foundations for the Internet. The Apollo program was just about to put a man on the moon - and it was Neil Armstrong, from right here in Ohio. The future felt limitless. But today, our government is broken.
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I'm not a politician. But neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America.
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The core problem in our society is political correctness.
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If you do something new, it will always look a little bit strange.
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Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable.
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You can achieve difficult things, but you can't achieve the impossible.
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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.
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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.
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There's no single right place to be an entrepreneur, but certainly there's something about Silicon Valley.
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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.
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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.
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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.