Peter Thiel Quotes

If everyone thinks one way, it is likely to be wrong. If you can figure out that it is wrong, you are likely to make a lot of money.

Human beings never think for themselves. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

I think people are looking for an alternative because in addition to there being sort of a myopic, lemming - like ants on a sugar cube mentality on this DNS attack story by many in the media, there's just this culture of sameness. Everybody sounds the same.

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!

Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society…

I have a suspicion of lockstep and everyone looking in the same direction: that's a key character trait in me.

I think herd mentality is a good thing overall. Because if every sheep had to figure out the velocity of the wolf and their personal risk, that would take forever.

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.

Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.

Crowds can be frightening. They have a way of impressing the low, base taste upon their members. Watching the way thousands of people in his audience could not think for themselves, could not find the courage to allow their ordinary feelings of decency and taste to prevail, I understood better how demagogues are possible.

Why should we pay so much attention to what the majority thinks?

[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.

I've probably said a million times in my life something about, "All those people are just lemmings. They'd follow each other off a cliff." Well, no such thing.

The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence.

Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

One can often hear from the young people:" I do not want to live according to others' mind. I can think of it myself. " Why should one think of something, when it is already thought about. Take it and go farther, this is the strength of the mankind.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe.

The average man's opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself.

The truth is that most people lack the intellectual ability and courage to resist a popular movement, however pernicious and ill-considered.

A contrarian approach is just as foolish as a follow-the-crowd strategy. What's required is thinking rather than polling.

The left are afraid of independent thinkers. They are afraid of people who are able to reason and think on their own.

A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.

Following the herd is fine, until they all run off the side of a cliff together.