Quotes from Peter Thiel

The big challenge with Internet financial services has been that it's very difficult to get large numbers of customers to sign up for your service.

I believe, basically, that individual freedom is very important.

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.

Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced, and there must be an intense belief in it.

The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

I believe that evolution is a true account of nature, but I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society.

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

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.

When parents have invested enormous amounts of money in their kids' education, to find their kids coming back to live with them - well, that was not what they bargained for.

Great investments may look crazy but really may not be.

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.

It's good to test yourself and develop your talents and ambitions as fully as you can and achieve greater success; but I think success is the feeling you get from a job well done, and the key thing is to do the work.

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

Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away.

If you're trying to develop a new drug, that costs you a billion dollars to get through the FDA. If you want to start a software company, you can get started with maybe $100,000.

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.

We protect monopolies with copyright.

All of us have to work toward a definite future... that can motivate and inspire people to change the world.

An entrepreneur must deal with more uncertainty than a professional with a well-defined role.

It is true that you can say that death is natural, but it is also natural to fight death. But if you stand up and say this is a big problem, we should do something about this, that makes people very uncomfortable, because they've made their peace with death.

As an undergraduate at Stanford, I started 'The Stanford Review,' which ended up being very engaged in the hot debates of the time: campus speech codes, questions about diversity on campus, all sorts of debates like that.

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.

Airbnb is undervalued.

Whenever I talk to people who founded a company, I often like to ask the prehistory questions 'When did you meet? How long have you been working before you started the company?' A bad answer is, 'We met at a networking event a week ago, and we started a company because we both want to be entrepreneurs.'