Quotes from Peter Thiel

Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human.

College gives people learning and also takes away future opportunities by loading the next generation down with debt.

Investors are always biased to invest in things they themselves understand. So venture capitalists like Uber because they like driving in black town cars. They don't like Airbnb because they like staying in five-star hotels, not sleeping on people's couches.

Today's 'best practices' lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.

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.

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

Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.

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

Our society, the dominant culture doesn't like science. It doesn't like technology.

I believe if we could enable people to live forever, we should do that. I think this is absolute.

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.

I'm skeptical of a lot of what falls under the rubric of education.... People are on these tracks. They are getting these credentials and it's very unclear how viable they are in many cases.

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

The value of failure is greatly over-rated. It's a preposterous myth.

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present.

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.

Moving first is a tactic, not a goal.