Peter Thiel Quotes

The Congress is not willing to think about the long term. They act like activist shareholders, to use that phrase again. They're not thinking about what can we do that will make us richer, safer, and stronger next year, and the year after, and five and 10 years out.

There is only one conflict, and that’s between short-term and long-term thinking.

[The Dalai Lama] told me some years ago, "I've made every concession to China, and I've been as open and tolerant as I could, and still things get worse in Tibet." If you look at it from one point of view, as he himself says, his monastic position of forbearance and nonviolence hasn't reaped any benefits. And yet, he's thinking in terms of the long term, of centuries.

I don't care what happens in 100 years. I won't be around.

I do tend to think that things that have incredibly long time horizons often do involve market failures.

I think somehow people should be encouraged to think about a very long time horizon and I think this is true for businesses, it's true for governments and it's true for people doing things in the non-profit sector.

If I make my window ten days for stand-up, the conclusion is that I failed and that I'm not good at stand-up. If I make it ten years - if I just wait - the conclusion might be something totally different. I think it's so cool to do things in which you discover the malleability of your own mind.

The only thing that matters is here and the only thing that matters is now. And America's inability to delay gratification is because we do not have eternal thinking.

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people, But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavours that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.

Whilst large organisations need foresight, they are also notorious in their bias for short term thinking, sometimes rejecting or even suppressing foresight.

When you're thinking about the rest of your life, you're never really thinking more than a couple years down the road.

I think there is a great deal to the idea of not doing a thing, but that when you do a thing, you don't do it in five minutes or in five hours, but in five years.

We are living in an interminable succession of absurdities imposed by the myopic logic of short-term thinking.

Capitalism is the best way of organizing economic activity for a lot of reasons. It unlocks a higher fraction of human potential, it balances supply and demand, it's more consistent with higher levels of freedom. But the way we're pursuing it now, focuses on such short-term horizons, that a lot of businesses and investors are tempted to look at investments in terms of what's gonna happen in the next 90 days, what's gonna happen in one year. But the old phrase, "Good things take time," is true of successful businesses as well.

America has been betrayed. We've been betrayed by the leadership that Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton have provided to this country over the last number of years. Think about just what's happened today.

My role in the government was not to think about narratives and consistency with narratives, but think of the human consequences of rules.

I think I have been perfectly clear in saying that I hope Canadians do elect a majority government. I think this cycle of election after election, minority after minority is beginning to put some of the country's interests in serious jeopardy.

Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

I do think the president's best role is usually as the sort of initiator.

American government is not dominated by engineers, it is dominated by lawyers. Engineers are interested in substance and building things; lawyers are interested in process and rights and getting the ideology correctly blended. And so there is sort of no really concrete plan for the future.

A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.

When making choices, or setting policies about the economy, education or medicine, society is best served by electing people who are particularly hardworking, intelligent and interested in long-term thinking.

Sometimes it's hard to take everyday concerns seriously when you think about vanished ecosystems that existed 300 million years ago and were eradicated by giant explosions. My goals haven't changed, because my goal has always been to save the world!

My job, personally, is to do as much as I can to spread the warning that if we're not careful, it will end. The problem is, we don't think beyond our immediate needs.