Peter Thiel People Quotations

There's always a sense that people will do things quite differently if they think they have privacy.

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.

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

I think people in Europe are generally pessimistic about the future. They have low expectations; they're not working hard to change things. When you're a slacker with a pessimistic view of the future, you're likely to meet those expectations.

Every time you write an email, it is in the public domain. There are all these ways where security is not as good as people believe.

Seventy percent of the planet is covered with water, and there's so much we can be doing with oceans, and it was one of the frontiers that people have more or less abandoned.

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.'

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

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.

I believe that people are too complacent about technology.

I suspect if people live a lot longer they would be retired for a somewhat longer period of time. Just the financial planning takes on a very different character.

I think competition can make people stronger at whatever it is they're competing on. If we're competing in some athletic event for competitive swimmers, really intensely competing, it's likely that both of us will become better, but it's also quite possible we'll lose sight of what's truly valuable.

People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.

People always say you should live your life as if it were your last day. I think you should live your life as though it will go on for ever; that every day is so good that you don't want it to end.

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

I would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer.

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

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.

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.

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.

People are worried about privacy, and its one of the reasons people are using a service like SnapChat.

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.

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.

Is there something about the gay experience, being gay and the gay experience, that pushes us even more than other people toward competition?

How to teach people to do what hasn't been done is a great riddle.

College gives people learning and also takes away future opportunities by loading the next generation down with debt.

I believe if we could enable people to live forever, we should do that. I think this is absolute.

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.

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.

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.

Big part of the challenge to innovation is that people too easily resign themselves to dying.

As an investor-entrepreneur, I’ve always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking.

Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead.

Thinking about how disturbingly herdlike people become in so many different contexts—mimetic theory forces you to think about that, which is knowledge that’s generally suppressed and hidden. As an investor-entrepreneur, I’ve always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking.

There are many more secrets in the world that are waiting to be found. The question of how many secrets exist in our world is roughly equivalent to how many startups people should start.

I think in my twenties I tended to think of all people as sort of more or less alike. In now think that people are really different in all these subtle ways that are very important.

Most people are average. Founders are not. Founders' traits seem to have an inverse normal distribution to them.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.

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.

Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school.

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.

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.