Peter Thiel Quotes

Attempting to get at truth means rejecting stereotypes and cliches.

Nothing energizes me more than to burrow myself under a pile of received wisdom and emerge triumphant with the truth.

All I would ask you to be thinking of is the truth and not Socrates.

I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions... Don't take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can't. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

Clarity and consistency are not enough: the quest for truth requires humility and effort.

You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.

I hope that I am generous and tolerant, but certainly on the intellectual side I think that there are discoverable truths, and some things that are closer approximations to the truth than others.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

All I've ever done is try to get at the truth of the matter.

One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.

If we bring not the good courage of minds covetous of truth, and truth only, prepared to hear all things, and decide upon all things, according to evidence, we should do more wisely to sit down contented in ignorance, than to bestir ourselves only to reap disappointment.

A philosopher goes where the truth leads and has no patience with mere emotion.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

Seek the company of those who are looking for the truth, but run from those who have found it.

I'm someone who likes to question things that are put in front of me, I like to think I'm someone who asks 'why sir?' not a 'yes sir.'

I would, like any other scientist, willingly change my mind if the evidence led me to do so. So I care about what's true, I care about evidence, I care about evidence as the reason for knowing what is true. It is true that I come across rather passionate sometimes - and that's because I am passionate about the truth... I do get very impatient with humbug, with cant, with fakery, with charlatans.

I think the appropriate kind of skepticism is this: you've got to be asking questions all the time, you've also got to make sure that you're doing so in the spirit of genuinely wanting to find the answers - and that also means being open. I battle with this: I know I tend to be very skeptical and as a result, I veer towards the dismissive. But being aware of the tendency, I like to challenge my own skepticism and make sure it's not just knee-jerk. You need to be skeptical towards yourself as well. When you're only skeptical outwards you've got an unbalanced skepticism.

An intelligent mind is an inquiring mind. It is not satisfied with explanation, with conclusions. Nor is it a mind that believes, because belief is again another form of conclusion.

A just thinker will allow full swing to his scepticism. I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.... We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.

I confess . . . that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very vast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.

A man ceases to be an honest doubter the moment he refuses one way of getting at the truth because he does not like that way.

Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it; doubt all, but do not doubt yourself.

I believe unconditionally in the ability of people to respond when they are told the truth. We need to be taught to study rather than believe, to inquire rather than to affirm.