Most people are average. Founders are not. Founders' traits seem to have an inverse normal distribution to them.
Peter ThielIf you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.
Peter ThielDarwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.
Peter ThielAmerican 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.
Peter ThielHigher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?
Peter Thiel