Peter Thiel Quotes - Page 5

Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.

For Hamlet, greatness means willingness to fight for reasons as thin as an eggshell: anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter.

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.

For a new payment product, you always have to ask, how much better is it than the current solution? So when we started Paypal, for eBay micro merchants, it was much better than getting the 7 to 10 days process of cashing a check in the mail. When you look at stores or physical worlds, places, a lot of these places are already set up to take cash or credit card. Apple Pay may be an incremental improvement, maybe a little bit better. But when you have something that's pretty good and you go to something that's perfect, sometimes it's very hard to drive adoption because the delta is not that big.

A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

There are still many large white spaces on the map of human knowledge. You can go discover them. So do it. Get out there and fill in the blank spaces. Every single moment is a possibility to go to these new places and explore them.

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.

We might describe our world as having retail sanity, but wholesale madness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's been a lot companies that have shown "zero to one" kind of growth in the computer, internet software age. Facebook and Google are zero to one companies. Apple's iPhone was the first smartphone that really works, and of course, then you scale it horizontally, but the vertical component was really critical. Space X would also be one.

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.

Our economy is broken. I'm not a politician, but neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America.

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.

When you already have $150 billion a year in revenues from the iPhone, it's very hard to come up with any new vertical that will sort of move the dial. And there's this sort of weird effect where the larger a company gets, the harder it is to come up with any new product that really moves the dial.

I do think Tim Cook is doing a very good job, I think he has almost impossibly big shoes to fill with Steve Jobs' departure. And so, that's the context always someone has to put things in. But, I do think that for the most part that Apple is at a point where it's much more focused on scale than on doing new things.

The lowest-hanging fruit in preventative medicine is just to really focus on nutrition.

If you invest in Microsoft or Oracle, or a number of other companies for that matter, you're fundamentally making a bet that there's going to be no innovation. So an investment in Microsoft is a bet that the operating system is going to stay the same, it won't be replaced by Linux, Google Docs, or a mobile platform like iOS or Android.

It's a horribly mismanaged company-probably a lot of pot smoking going on there.

I'm always very excited about trying to do something on next-generation biotechnology and life sciences because I think if we can cure cancer or dementia, we can really make the future a lot better and I think these things are eminently doable.

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.

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.