Peter Thiel Quotes

If anyone ever tells me something doesn't go together, it makes me want to try it.

When you're used to being prepared to reject conventional wisdom, it leaves you open to learn more.

The impossible - we are told - cannot be achieved. To overcome the 'impossible,' we need to use our wits and be fearless. We need to break the rules and to circumvent - some would one say to cheat.

I've always shied away from conventional wisdom, though I know the power of it.

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.

It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.

An understandable prejudice of intellectual life leads us to view tilters at orthodoxy as courageous front-line innovators.

I always grew up with, 'Question authority.'

The people that were most interesting were always questioning the status quo.

I don't think we ought to base our policy on what the conventional wisdom is.... The conventional wisdom usually is wrong.

Innovation is the key to the future, but basic research is the key to future innovation.

… after some hundreds of years of experience we think that we have learned … how to teach what is known. But now with the undeniable upsurge of scientific research, we cannot continue to rely on the mere fact that we have learned how to teach what is known. We must learn to teach the best attitude to what is not yet known.

I always like to do something different, something unusual, stray off the path a bit.

If you do something that's not pigeonholed, it gets thrown into the 'We don't know what this is' bin, and so let's not talk about it so much.

I like to reinvent with each project, in any which way possible.

We've never tried to fit any mould because we already broke the one we started.

I reject most conventional wisdom.

We value feeling over knowing, because you can't prove something that hasn't been done before.

To be a contrarian, you've got to be a contrarian against your own people.

I went to grad school because I wanted to learn the rules so I would know how to break them. Breaking the rules is saying, 'I'm breaking in, OK? I'm breaking in your very comfortable little house over here, and I'm going to take a room.'

I don't want to be married to any ideology, because life is a lot more fluid than that, and I think that we're trained and conditioned in this country to think in teams.

I want to do stories that are about the bits of cultural furniture that are sitting there that we're like, 'Oh yeah, that's been there for years! What could possibly be weird about it?' And then we're going to lift that piece of furniture and look at all the bugs scurry away.

I think you have to be creative to make a difference in science.

I've done that my whole life - I've taken the way people think and turned it on its head.