Peter Diamandis Quotes

Back in 2007, I had the opportunity to meet Professor Stephen Hawking through the X PRIZE Foundation. In my first conversation with him I learned that he was passionate about flying into space someday.

You could not legally put a human and fly them into space. In fact, you couldn't bring a spaceship back. All those spaceships we were sending commercially into space were one way. You sort of like, got rid of them. And most passengers, who go up, do want to come back down.

We have these 100 mms delays, you know, our attention is on our PDA, we're always in a rush. We drive around in these 4,000 pound metal wombs, these 4,000 pound containment systems to protect us from these 6,000 pound cars from smacking us.

A Masai warrior on a cellphone in the middle of Kenya has better mobile comm than President Reagan did 25 years ago.

Imagine a world of nine billion people with clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, and nonpolluting, ubiquitous energy. Building this better world is humanity's grandest challenge.

It's sad that the U.S. government doesn't fund risky research anymore.

Stuff goes wrong. Expect it, learn from it, fix it. That's how remarkable happens.

The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.

If the risk is fully aligned with your purpose and mission, then it's worth considering.

I think people are dreaming big because they have the tools to dream big. I hope that people are dreaming big because it makes them feel good about their lives.

If someone is always to blame, if every time something goes wrong someone has to be punished, people quickly stop taking risks. Without risks, there can't be breakthroughs.

By 2020 the U.S. will be short 91,000 doctors. There's no way we can educate enough doctors to make up that shortfall, and other countries are far worse off.

More than ever before in history, individuals can now band together to solve grand challenges. We face enormous problems, but we 'as individuals' have enormous power to solve them.

The price to generate a megawatt or a gigawatt of energy is coming down year after year. We're learning how to print it, make it more efficient.

Today, philanthropy is a very unsophisticated, old world process where people who make a shitload of money go and give it away and when they're making their money, they're focused on 10x, 100x returns on the dollar.

Small teams driven by their passion with a clear focus can do extraordinary things. Things that only large corporations and governments could do in the past.

Many have built their careers buttressing the status quo, reinforcing what theyve already accomplished, and resisting the radical thinking that can topple their legacy - not exactly the attitude you want when trying to drive innovation forward.

True disruption means threatening your existing product line and your past investments. Breakthrough products disrupt current lines of businesses.

I believed that once we got to the Moon, there was no stopping us. But in fact, we did stop.

Large companies and government agencies have a lot to protect and therefore are not willing to take big risks. A large company taking a risk can threaten its stock price. A government agency taking a risk can threaten congressional investigation.

When faced without a challenge, make one

I get demoralized by organizations that start off with a mission and pull back when they find it's risky.

What opened up the American West was the fact that you owned the real estate. You owned the gold mines, the oil wells. The creation of these, back then, million dollar industries drove the railroads and eventually the airlines to provide this kind of transportation.

I'm extraordinarily passionate about the idea of asteroid mining in the future. Asteroids out there, we know them from those that have fallen on the Earth, there is a class of asteroids, sub-class of nickel/iron asteroids, which are 50,000 times more enriched than Platinum mines on earth.

Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear.

The question companies have to ask, or governments have to ask is, where do we allow crazy ideas to bubble up? Because if there is a failure, what happens? Someone gets blame. There's a lawsuit, there's a congressional investigation. And so, those things shut down the creative engine.

The folks who go after grand challenges are impatient. They're pissed off. They're sick and tired, but in a passionate way. They're driven by a fire in their bellies to make a difference.

The thing about frontiers, it allows the individuals who are best, whether they're men or women or minorities or whatever, to step to the top. So in traditional societies, old world societies, in the United Kingdom if you would; if you were born into the right stratus, the right class, you had the ability to succeed.

Today, a group of 20 individuals empowered by the exponential growing technologies of AI and robotics and computers and networks and eventually nanotechnology can do what only nation states could have done before.

I became very much, if I have to describe myself, I'm sort of a Libertarian Capitalist, and I was looking for, what's the economic engine that's going to drive us into space?

One of my goals is to reinvent philanthropy.

At its core, bitcoin is a smart currency, designed by very forward-thinking engineers. It eliminates the need for banks, gets rid of credit card fees, currency exchange fees, money transfer fees, and reduces the need for lawyers in transitions all good things

An expert is someone who can tell you exactly how it can't be done.

You've got to choose your horse ahead of time. So, if you're interested in water technology, energy technology, you get to choose between the three or four companies that you have insight into. And you have to make a bet on them before they prove anything out.

Eight billion people will have Internet access by 2020.

In 1980, during my sophomore year at MIT, I realized that the school didn't have a student space organization. I made posters for a group I called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space and put them up all over campus. Thirty-five people showed up. It was the first thing I ever organized, and it took off!

We are not going to stop here on planet Earth. We're going to move out to other planetary bodies.

During the next 50 years, in countless cycles, in countless entrepreneurial companies, this let's just go and do it mentality will help us finally get off the planet and irreversibly open the space frontier. The capital and tools are finally being placed into the hands of those willing to risk, willing to fail, willing to follow the dreams.

I'm not saying we don't have our set of problems - climate crisis, species extinction, water and energy shortage - we surely do. But ultimately we knock them down.

Without risks, there can't be breakthroughs.

In the space business, space had gotten very much to be the aerospace industry. This is something that governments only do and it's where the Boeings and the Lockheed's and the Northrop's and so forth. And there's no way these small companies could do it.

Space is not a two-year objective. It used to be, in the early '60's, we had this eye candy of Mercury and Gemini and Apollo and every year we would do something more and more and it met those needs. But the easy stuff has been done.

The paradigm I want to change is that, you can have a car that is beautiful, manufacturable, affordable, safe, fast, and oh, by the way, does 100 mpg, or its energy equivalent. Why wouldn't you?

If you stop and you think about everything we hold of value on this planet, metal, minerals, energy, real estate, the things that nations fight wars over. These things are in near infinite quantities out there.

I founded a launch company called International Microspace when I graduated medical school in 1989. We were trying to build a microsatellite launcher.

The meek shall inherit the earth. The rest of us are going to the stars.

Creating abundance [is] not about creating a life of luxury for everybody on this planet; it's about creating a life of possibility.

We are racing toward a world of abundance, and we are going to be increasing the quality of life for everyone on this planet. The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities.