Quotes from Peter Thiel

You don't want to just do 'me too' companies that are copying what others are doing.

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

What is it about our society where anyone who does not have Asperger's gets talked out of their heterodox ideas?

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

Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices. Since it has no competition, it produces at the quantity and price combination that maximizes its profits.

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

I think society is both something that's very real and very powerful, but on the whole quite problematic.

You can achieve difficult things, but you can't achieve the impossible.

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.

Technology just means information technology.

There's absolutely no bubble in technology.

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.

Society is secretly driven by sales

Credentials are critical if you want to do something professional. If you want to become a doctor or lawyer or teacher or professor, there is a credentialing process. But there are a lot of other things where it's not clear they're that important.

I'm very pro-science and pro-technology; I believe that these have been key drivers of progress in the world in the last centuries.

I worked at a law firm in New York very briefly.

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.

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.

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

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.

Most of 'big data' is a fraud because it is really 'dumb data.'

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.

The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system. The next Larry Page won't start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't start a social network company. If you are copying these people, you are not learning from them.