Peter Thiel

“Unsolved problems are where you'll find opportunity. Energy is one sector with extremely urgent unsolved problems.”

“I think what's always important is not to be contrarian for its own sake but to really get at the truth.”

“I believe that people are too complacent about technology.”

“You don't want to just do 'me too' companies that are copying what others are doing.”

“I believe that evolution is a true account of nature, but I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society.”

“I suspect if people live a lot longer they would be retired for a somewhat longer period of time. Just the financial planning takes on a very different character.”

“College gives people learning and also takes away future opportunities by loading the next generation down with debt.”

“You will never build a company on the scale of a Facebook or a Google if you sell it along the way.”

“You can achieve difficult things, but you can't achieve the impossible.”

“One of my first investments was $100,000 in a Web-based calendar startup - and I lost every dollar.”

“Every time you write an email, it is in the public domain. There are all these ways where security is not as good as people believe.”

“I think it's a problem that we don't have more companies like Facebook. It shouldn't be the only company that's doing this well.”

“How to teach people to do what hasn't been done is a great riddle.”

“I would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer.”

“Great investments may look crazy but really may not be.”

“Technologies like PayPal foster competition because they enable people to shift their funds from one jurisdiction to another, and I think that ultimately will lead to a world in which there's less government power and therefore more individual control.”

“I believe if we could enable people to live forever, we should do that. I think this is absolute.”

“I think people in Europe are generally pessimistic about the future. They have low expectations; they're not working hard to change things. When you're a slacker with a pessimistic view of the future, you're likely to meet those expectations.”

“Investors are always biased to invest in things they themselves understand. So venture capitalists like Uber because they like driving in black town cars. They don't like Airbnb because they like staying in five-star hotels, not sleeping on people's couches.”

“I did not want to write just another business book.”