Top 200 Peter Thiel Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Peter Thiel

52. “You are not a lottery ticket.”

— Peter Thiel

53. “When you are starting a new business you don’t want to go after giant markets. You want to go after small markets and take over those markets quickly.”

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

55. “Winning is better than losing, but everybody loses when the war isn’t one worth fighting.”

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

58. “Everybody has a product to sell – no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.”

— Peter Thiel

59. “The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it.”

— Peter Thiel

60. “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

61. “Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.”

— Peter Thiel

62. “If they don’t go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers.”

— Peter Thiel

63. “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

64. “If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now?”

— Peter Thiel

65. “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

66. “The value of failure is greatly over-rated. It’s a preposterous myth.”

— Peter Thiel

67. “Beginning with brand rather than substance is dangerous.”

— Peter Thiel

68. “I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it’s something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn’t compute with our existing educational system.”

— Peter Thiel

69. “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

70. “A lot of the key to Apple’s succes is Designing technology in order to hide it.”

— Peter Thiel

71. “Competition is for losers.”

— Peter Thiel

72. “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

73. “In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work.”

— Peter Thiel

74. “Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.”

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

76. “Forget startup companies. The next frontier is startup countries.”

— Peter Thiel

77. “As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt: Avoid competition as much as possible.”

— Peter Thiel

78. “A good startup should have the potential for great scale built into its first design.”

— Peter Thiel

79. “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.”

— Peter Thiel

80. “A company does better the less it pays the CEO.”

— Peter Thiel

81. “I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years – part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.”

— Peter Thiel

82. “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed.”

— Peter Thiel

83. “Network effects can be powerful, but you’ll never reap them unless your product is valuable to its very first users when the network is necessarily small.”

— Peter Thiel

84. “All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.”

— Peter Thiel

85. “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

86. “In the world of business, at least, Shakespeare proves the superior guide. Inside a firm, people become obsessed with their competitors for career advancement. Then the firms themselves become obsessed with their competitors in the marketplace. Amid all the human drama, people lose sight of what matters and focus on their rivals instead.”

— Peter Thiel

87. “The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.”

— Peter Thiel

88. “Luck is like an atheistic word for God...”

— Peter Thiel

89. “The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.”

— Peter Thiel

90. “Simply stated, the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future.”

— Peter Thiel

91. “Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it’s much more important than free trade.”

— Peter Thiel

92. “Technology and capitalism are very much linked. I think that capitalism probably works best in a technologically progressing society.”

— Peter Thiel

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “People don’t want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology – all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.”

— Peter Thiel

97. “In the short term I want to change the world, In the long term I want to live forever.”

— Peter Thiel

98. “Value investors look at cash flows. If a company can maintain present cash flows for 5 or 6 years, it’s a good investment. Investors then just hope that those cash flows – and thus the company’s value – don’t decrease faster than they anticipate.”

— Peter Thiel

99. “If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.”

— Peter Thiel

100. “First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.”

— Peter Thiel