Peter Thiel famous quotes

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.
-- Peter Thiel

#Zuckerberg #Guy #Pages

If you have technological progress, that will encourage more capitalist system. On the other hand, if you don't, if things are stalled, you end up with much more of a zero sum type thing, where there's no progress and basically everybody's gain is somebody else's loss.
-- Peter Thiel

#Zero #Loss #Hands

In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms—from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’ . . . We are in a deadly race between politics and technology. . . . The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.
-- Peter Thiel

#Fate #Technology #Our World

I think that markets classically fail in cases where there are public goods that provide benefits that people cannot capture. The big debate is how big these public goods are, where they exist, things of that sort.
-- Peter Thiel

#Thinking #People #Benefits

Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?
-- Peter Thiel

#Smart #School #Careers

If people were super-optimistic about technology there would be no reason to be pessimistic about the future.
-- Peter Thiel

#Optimistic #Technology #People

You have as much computing power in your iPhone as was available at the time of the Apollo missions. But what is it being used for? It’s being used to throw angry birds at pigs; it’s being used to send pictures of your cat to people halfway around the world; it’s being used to check in as the virtual mayor of a virtual nowhere while you’re riding a subway from the nineteenth century.
-- Peter Thiel

#Cat #Pigs #Iphone

The debt austerity would not be problems if we had technological progress. If you doubled the debt in the U.S., and the size of the economy doubled because of technological progress and growth, the two would roughly cancel out and it would all be a totally manageable situation.
-- Peter Thiel

#Two #Growth #Progress

All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
-- Peter Thiel

#Competition #Company

One of the reasons I think people are increasingly nervous about U.S. debt is because they think that we are not actually digging ourselves out of the hole, but instead are digging ourselves into a deeper and deeper hole and will not be able to pay it back because we're not actually creating the new technologies that will enable us to pay back and the money somehow is not really being invested in the future or in progress.
-- Peter Thiel

#Technology #Thinking #Creating

Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.
-- Peter Thiel

#Opportunity #Past #Causes

In the U.S., we fundamentally need to do new things, which I think is harder for the government to do. And moreover, it is not something our government actually is inclined to particularly do.
-- Peter Thiel

#Thinking #Government #Needs

Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone.
-- Peter Thiel

#People #Gone #Able

American government is not dominated by engineers, it is dominated by lawyers. Engineers are interested in substance and building things; lawyers are interested in process and rights and getting the ideology correctly blended. And so there is sort of no really concrete plan for the future.
-- Peter Thiel

#Rights #Government #Substance

All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
-- Peter Thiel

#Unique #Competition #Different

The idea of becoming an entrepreneur is something that is not taught very well in school and is something that people should try to do earlier on.
-- Peter Thiel

#School #Ideas #People

Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.
-- Peter Thiel

#Running #Perfect #Long

Education needs to be rethought. Education does not just happen in college, but it also happens in developing skills which will enable people to contribute to our society as a whole.
-- Peter Thiel

#College #Skills #People

In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).
-- Peter Thiel

#Careers #Organization #Done

The developing world can just do things that are extensive or horizontal, that basically copy. The developed world needs to do things that are intensive or vertical, where we take our civilization to the next level.
-- Peter Thiel

#Civilization #World #Levels

I'm skeptical of a lot of what falls under the rubric of education.... People are on these tracks. They are getting these credentials and it's very unclear how viable they are in many cases.
-- Peter Thiel

#Fall #People #Track

I'm in favor of free trade, but I think if you had to make a choice between having technological progress versus free trade, you had one or the other, you should always pick technological progress. I think it's an incredibly important variable for creating more prosperity.
-- Peter Thiel

#Thinking #Creating #Choices

Great tech opportunities happen only once.
-- Peter Thiel

#Opportunity

If the slogan for Google is 'Don't be evil', then the slogan for Uber is 'Do a little bit of evil & don't get caught.'
-- Peter Thiel

#Evil #Google #Slogans

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
-- Peter Thiel

#Believe #Democracy

We need more pessimism that the future might be a lot worse, and we need more optimism that the future might be better.
-- Peter Thiel

#Optimism #Might #Needs

In the developed world, technological progress means that you can have a situation where there's growth, where there's a way in which everybody can be better off over time.
-- Peter Thiel

#Mean #Growth #Progress

If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.
-- Peter Thiel

#Lying #Belief #Delusional

Technology and capitalism are very much linked. I think that capitalism probably works best in a technologically progressing society.
-- Peter Thiel

#Thinking #Technology #Progress

I do think Bitcoin is the first [encrypted money] that has the potential to do something like change the world.
-- Peter Thiel

#Thinking #Firsts #World

I think somehow people should be encouraged to think about a very long time horizon and I think this is true for businesses, it's true for governments and it's true for people doing things in the non-profit sector.
-- Peter Thiel

#Thinking #Government #Long

A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It's like telling the world there's no Santa Claus.
-- Peter Thiel

#Believe #Learning #People

I think markets are often not thinking on a long-time horizon, I think that our government structurally is doing even less so. When we have a government where we have people who are up for election at most once every six years for a U.S. senator, that's a time horizon that is much shorter than in a market that a company is looking at 10, 15, 20 years which is a time horizon over which a stock price is typically valued.
-- Peter Thiel

#Thinking #Government #Years

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

#Years #Debt #World

If you think about basic science or coming up with new theories of mathematics, these are not the kinds of things which are necessarily a well-defined market to pay people.
-- Peter Thiel

#Thinking #People #Pay

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.
-- Peter Thiel

#Character #Car #Flying

I do tend to think that things that have incredibly long time horizons often do involve market failures.
-- Peter Thiel

#Thinking #Long #Horizon

All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.
-- Peter Thiel

#Past #Scholar

It is sort of a bit of a caricature of capitalism, that it's always this zero-sum game where you have winners and losers. Silicon Valley, the technology industry at its best, creates a situation where everybody can be a winner.
-- Peter Thiel

#Zero #Technology #Games

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

#Successful #Ideas #Different

Forget startup companies. The next frontier is startup countries.
-- Peter Thiel

#Country #Next #Forget

What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
-- Peter Thiel

#People #Important #Agree

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

#Practice #Today #Path

There is perhaps no specific time that is necessarily right to start your company or start your life. But some times and some moments seem more auspicious than others. Now is such a moment. If we don’t take charge and usher in the future—if you don’t take charge of your life—there is the sense that no one else will.
-- Peter Thiel

#Moments #Company

University administrators are the equivalent of subprime mortgage brokers selling you a story that you should go into debt massively, that it's not a consumption decision, it's an investment decision. Actually, no, it's a bad consumption decision. Most colleges are four-year parties.
-- Peter Thiel

#Party #College #Years

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

#Successful #Doe

Every time we create something new we go from zero to one.
-- Peter Thiel

#Zero #Something New

We might describe our world as having retail sanity, but wholesale madness
-- Peter Thiel

#Our World #Retail #Might

People working on bigger ideas on a more protracted timeline will be more on the stealth side. They aren't releasing new PR announcements every day. The bigger the secret and the likelier it is that you alone have it, the more time you have to execute. There may be far more people going after hard secrets than we think.
-- Peter Thiel

#Thinking #Ideas #People

Every tech story is different. Every moment in history happens only once. All successful companies are successful in their own unique way. It's your task to figure out what that future history will be.
-- Peter Thiel

#Successful #Unique #Stories

Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it.
-- Peter Thiel

#Fighting #Mind #Body

There are quite a lot of people who think my aspirations are not possible. That's a good thing. We don't need to really worry about these people very much, because since they don't think it's possible they won't take us very seriously- and they will not actually try to stop us until it's too late.
-- Peter Thiel

#Thinking #People #Worry