Ted > Ted's Quotes

“The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher 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, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“moving first is a tactic, not a goal.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The best protection against propaganda of any sort is the recognition of it for what it is. Only hidden and undetected oratory is really insidious. What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of business. Propaganda taken in that way is like a drug you do not know you are swallowing. The effect is mysterious; you do not know afterwards why you feel or think the way you do.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“the essence of tragedy is time, or rather the lack of it. There is no problem in any Greek tragedy that could not have been solved if there had been enough time, but there is never enough. Decisions, choices have to be made in a moment, there is no time to think and weigh the consequences; and, since even tragic heroes are fallible—especially fallible, perhaps—the decisions are wrong. It is easy for us to see what should have been done, but would we have been able to see in time? That is the question that you should always ask in reading any Greek tragedy.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“Philosophy is like science and unlike history in that it seeks general truths rather than an account of particular events, either in the near or distant past.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book