Quotes by Peter Thiel

When we think about the future, we hope for a future of progress. That progress can take one of two forms. Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work—going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things—going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.

No company has a culture, every company is a culture

Nutrition matters for everybody, but you can’t major in it at Harvard. Most top scientists go into other fields. Most of the big studies were done 30 or 40 years ago, and most are seriously flawed. The food pyramid that told us to eat low fat and enormous amounts of grains was probably more a product of lobbying by Big Food than real science; its chief impact has been to aggravate our obesity epidemic. There’s plenty more to learn: we know more about the physics of faraway stars than we know about human nutrition. It won’t be easy, but it’s not obviously impossible: exactly the kind of field that could yield secrets.

Entrepreneurship: you put one dumb foot in front of the other while the world throws bricks at your head.

If you take one typewriter and build 100, you’ve made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.

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.

Every one of todays smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.

Its 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.

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 its not clear theyre that important.

People dont 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.

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

There have been a lot of critiques of the finance industrys having possibly foisted subprime mortgages on unknowing buyers, and a lot of those kinds of arguments are even more powerful when used against college administrators who are probably in some ways engaged in equally misleading advertising.

We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius.

Monopolies are bad and deserve their reputation when things are static and the monopolies function as toll collectors... But I think theyre quite positive when theyre dynamic and do something new.

Technology just means information technology.

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.

Theres absolutely no bubble in technology.

If the whole U.S. was like Silicon Valley, wed be in good shape. But now, the entire U.S. is not driven by technology, is not driven by innovation.