Top 200 Peter Thiel Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.”

— Peter Thiel

Featured in: Making Money Quotes

2. “Every time we create something new we go from zero to one.”

— Peter Thiel

Featured in: Quotes About Ideas

3. “Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit.”

— Peter Thiel

Featured in: Making Money Quotes

4. “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

5. “What valuable company is nobody building?”

— Peter Thiel

Featured in: Startup Quotes

6. “Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”

— Peter Thiel

Featured in: Genius Quotes

7. “Today’s ‘best practices’ lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.”

— Peter Thiel

Featured in: Path Quotes, Innovation Quotes

8. “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

— Peter Thiel

9. “Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.”

— Peter Thiel

10. “The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.”

— Peter Thiel

11. “Competition is overrated. In practice it is quite destructive and should be avoided wherever possible. Much better than fighting for scraps in existing markets is to create and own new ones.”

— Peter Thiel

Featured in: Startup Quotes, Competition Quotes

12. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

— Peter Thiel

13. “There are only two kinds of businesses in this world: Businesses in crazy competition, and businesses that are one of a kind.”

— Peter Thiel

Featured in: Competition Quotes

14. “What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.”

— Peter Thiel

15. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal.”

— Peter Thiel

16. “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

17. “If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.”

— Peter Thiel

18. “We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today.”

— Peter Thiel

19. “Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced.”

— Peter Thiel

20. “The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.”

— Peter Thiel

21. “All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”

— Peter Thiel

22. “There’s a wide range of sales ability: there are many gradations between novices, experts, and masters. There are even sales grandmasters. If you don’t know any grandmasters, it’s not because you haven’t encountered them, but rather because their art is hidden in plain sight.”

— Peter Thiel

23. “Secrets are hard but solvable problems and we should talk about them. It’s hard to work toward a radically better future if you don’t believe in secrets.”

— Peter Thiel

24. “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

25. “In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.”

— Peter Thiel

26. “Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.”

— Peter Thiel

27. “No company has a culture, every company is a culture.”

— Peter Thiel

28. “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

29. “The something of somewhere is mostly just the nothing of nowhere.”

— Peter Thiel

30. “Higher education holds itself out as a kind of universal church, outside of which there is no salvation.”

— Peter Thiel

31. “The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.”

— Peter Thiel

32. “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.”

— Peter Thiel

33. “Whatever the career, sales ability distinguishes superstars from also-rans.”

— Peter Thiel

34. “The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.”

— Peter Thiel

35. “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.”

— Peter Thiel

36. “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.”

— Peter Thiel

37. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

— Peter Thiel

38. “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

39. “Society is secretly driven by sales.”

— Peter Thiel

40. “You’ll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it’s important in general, but why you’re doing something important that no one else is going to get done.”

— Peter Thiel

41. “The business model piece is we’re always talking about competing more effectively. If you’re starting a company or career you don’t want to compete. You want to create a monopoly. We want to invest in a company that has a good plan to create a monopoly.”

— Peter Thiel

42. “The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that’s very different from the present.”

— Peter Thiel

43. “Great tech opportunities happen only once.”

— Peter Thiel

44. “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.”

— Peter Thiel

45. “Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.”

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

47. “Every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.”

— Peter Thiel

48. “Anyone who prefers owning part of your company to being paid in cash reveals a preference for the long term and a commitment to increasing your company’s value in the future.”

— Peter Thiel

49. “Competition is for losers.”

— Peter Thiel

50. “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.”

— Peter Thiel