Peter Thiel

“I spend an awful lot of time just thinking about what is going on in the world and talking to people about that. It's probably one of my default social activities, just getting dinners with friends.”

“No company has a culture, every company is a culture”

“Nutrition matters for everybody, but you can’t major in it at Harvard. Most top scientists go into other fields. Most of the big studies were done 30 or 40 years ago, and most are seriously flawed. The food pyramid that told us to eat low fat and enormous amounts of grains was probably more a product of lobbying by Big Food than real science; its chief impact has been to aggravate our obesity epidemic. There’s plenty more to learn: we know more about the physics of faraway stars than we know about human nutrition. It won’t be easy, but it’s not obviously impossible: exactly the kind of field that could yield secrets.”

“Don't bother starting the 10,000th restaurant in Manhattan. Find something to do that if you don't do it, it won't get done.”

“If you borrowed money and went to a college where the education didn't create any value, that is potentially a really big mistake.”

“My only claim is that not all talented people should go to college and not all talented people should do the exact same thing.”

“People always say you should live your life as if it were your last day. I think you should live your life as though it will go on for ever; that every day is so good that you don't want it to end.”

“Credentials are critical if you want to do something professional. If you want to become a doctor or lawyer or teacher or professor, there is a credentialing process. But there are a lot of other things where it's not clear they're that important.”

“When people use the word 'science,' it's often a tell, like in poker, that you're bluffing.”

“The first question we would ask if aliens landed on this planet is not, 'What does this mean for the economy or jobs?' It would be, 'Are they friendly or unfriendly?'”

“We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius.”

“When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?”

“Seventy percent of the planet is covered with water, and there's so much we can be doing with oceans, and it was one of the frontiers that people have more or less abandoned.”

“When I moved to Cleveland, defense research was laying the foundations for the Internet. The Apollo program was just about to put a man on the moon - and it was Neil Armstrong, from right here in Ohio. The future felt limitless. But today, our government is broken.”

“Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone.”

“We protect monopolies with copyright.”

“The millennial generation in the US is the first that has reduced expectations from those of their parents. And I think there is something decadent and declinist about that.”

“The big challenge with Internet financial services has been that it's very difficult to get large numbers of customers to sign up for your service.”

“Whenever I talk to people who founded a company, I often like to ask the prehistory questions 'When did you meet? How long have you been working before you started the company?' A bad answer is, 'We met at a networking event a week ago, and we started a company because we both want to be entrepreneurs.'”

“When parents have invested enormous amounts of money in their kids' education, to find their kids coming back to live with them - well, that was not what they bargained for.”