Peter Thiel Quotations | Page 2

Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create.

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.

One of my friends started a company in 1997, seven years before Facebook, called SocialNet. And they had all these ideas, and you could be, like, a cat, and I'd be a dog on the Internet, and we'd have this virtual reality, and we would just not be ourselves. That didn't work because reality always works better than any fake version of it.

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

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.

A conventional truth can be important - it's essential to learn elementary mathematics, for example - but it won't give you an edge. It's not a secret.

I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I'd like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit.

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

If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That's why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done.

Spiraling demand for resources of which our world contains a finite supply is the great long-term threat posed by globalisation. That is why we need new technology to relieve it.