Peter Diamandis Quotes

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.

I live in L.A., where every coffee shop is filled with scriptwriters, producers and directors.

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.

Even in an organization that's doing something big and bold, there's the mundane, day-to-day execution work of keeping it going. But people need to stay connected to the boldness, to the vision, and stay plugged in to the main vein of the dream.

As of the mid-90s, over 50 percent of women have a bachelor's and master's degree, compared to about 35 percent and 30 percent, respectively, in 1920.

The idea of a young thin woman who weighs 100 pounds driving herself around in a 4,000 pound SUV is laughable.

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

The fact that the Virgin logo was on the side of SpaceShipOne on October 4th, 2004 was fantastic.

Government research has to go through peer review.

I ended up realizing that NASA was unlikely to get me into space, or get me to the moon or beyond, and I needed some other way to drive this.

If you give people unlimited time and money, they'll do things the same old way. But if they have to achieve the goal in a brief time, they'll either give up or try something new.

It's easy to forget that for centuries - for millennia - the 'workforce' was all of us.

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,

My goal is there's a new generation of cars. And people can say we're living in a new day and age. A new day and age of cars that are beautiful, affordable, safe, and of course every car gets over 100 mpg, why wouldn't it.

We're now able to 3D print in 200 different materials, from titanium to rubber, plastic, glass, ceramic, leathers, and even chocolate.

Every generation feels it has the problems that will destroy it. That's because we can perceive them a long time before we have the ability to fix them.

The rate of innovation is a function of the total number of people connected and exchanging ideas. It has gone up as population has gone up. It's gone up as people have concentrated in cities.

In 1980, it cost just under $600 to take a round-trip flight within the United States.

The challenge is that the day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea. And crazy ideas are very risky to attempt.

Super-ambitious goals tend to be unifying and energizing to people; but only if they believe there's a chance of success.

Find that thing that you are passionate about, that you will do day or night whether someone pays you or not ... because if you have that, you will have gold.

When I talk about taking bold actions in the world, few things are bolder than creating the 'Huffington Post' from scratch and reinventing the newspaper business.

Collective management will build companies - not top-down decision-making.

In the 1960s, 110 countries had averages of six or more children per family.

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.

Old-style management is irrelevant.

Your mission is to find a product or service that can positively impact the lives of 1 billion people because that's the game we're playing today.

The Department of Energy made an investment that failed, and it got raked over the coals for that failed investment. This is ridiculous. The fact of the matter is, the government should be making a lot of risky investments, the majority of which are likely to fail.

The automotive X Prize, to a great degree, is focused on addressing petroleum usage and carbon emissions.

Nothing matters more than your health. Healthy living is priceless. What millionaire wouldn't pay dearly for an extra 10 or 20 years of healthy aging?

My personal fascination with the power of the crowd has been growing: Exactly what can a 'crowd' accomplish? We know crowds can raise billions of dollars, create Wikipedia, and even design and build small autonomous drones. But how about something large and complex like designing a new car, and maybe someday even a spaceship?

Drones photograph, prospect and advertise real estate from golf courses to skyscrapers; they also monitor construction in progress.

I had started Zero-G specifically to broaden the public for access to weightlessness.

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.

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.

3D printing has digitized the entire manufacturing process.

In 1900, 180-plus out of every 1,000 African-American babies died.

I've stopped watching TV news. They couldn't pay me enough money.

All over the world, we're seeing access to food, clean water, education and healthcare improve; as a result, global innovation is rising as well.

As of 2011, it cost about $5,000 to launch a tech startup.

Private companies should be building businesses.

As you may know, I'm the co-founder and co-chairman of an asteroid company called Planetary Resources that is backed by a group of eight billionaires to implement the bold mission of extracting resources from near-Earth asteroids.

The first trillionaire can be made in space.

The Net is allowing us to turn ourselves into a giant, collective meta-intelligence. And this meta-intelligence continues to grow as more and more people come online.

Future companies will be smaller and more nimble.

There are nearly one billion illiterate people on Earth.

Have an open mind - allow different ideas into your way of thinking.

Passion gets an entrepreneur through the startup days and the enormous efforts it takes to build a business.

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

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

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.

Because it's cheaper and easier to fly than ever before, air travel is becoming democratized.

If you have a fear of flying, don't. The data are very clear: If you have to travel someplace, the safest way is by airplane.

Eight billion people will have Internet access by 2020.

Most advertisers spend millions upon millions of dollars to buy commercial time during the Super Bowl, and millions in creating eye-popping ads, hoping to create catchy, unforgettable commercials. Unfortunately, most Super Bowl commercials end up being unmemorable. Costly mistakes for brands and creative flameouts for advertising firms.

Today, every skirmish in every part of the planet is broadcast straight into your living room live, in HD ... over and over again.

In 1976, Kodak's first digital camera shot at 0.1 megapixels, weighed 3.75 pounds, and cost over $10,000.

Abundance is not about providing everyone on this planet with a life of luxury - rather it's about providing all with a life of possibility.

I have the general philosophy of creating the future you want to see.

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

I collect a lot of data. We all do.

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.

I think we're heading towards a world of what I call 'technological socialism.' Where technology - not the government or the state - will begin to take care of us. Technology will provide our healthcare for free. The best education in the world - for free.

I think that we're living in a time where there are trillion-dollar opportunities that never existed before.

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.

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.

With faster Internet and better computers, you'd better believe we're creating and consuming more digital data.

3D printing will massively reduce the cost of certain products as the cost of labor is removed.

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.

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.

Revealing water in significant quantities on the Moon could truly be a turning point in space exploration.

I was seeing a lot of entrepreneurs who were effectively working on the next photo-sharing app. I wanted to inspire them to go much bigger, bolder and more significant than that.

Because it's free, easy to use, and high-quality, photography is now a fixture in our daily lives - something we take for granted.

One of my goals is to reinvent philanthropy.

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.

As humans, we have evolved to compete ... it is in our genes, and we love to watch a competition.

Make it clear up front what the aim of the company is. Stay true to your authentic vision.

Now, we connect via Skype or Google+ Hangout and see our friends' and loved ones' faces live.

Humans are the worst control system to put in front of a car.

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

In 2000, just before the first dot-com bubble burst, it cost a whopping $5 million to launch a tech startup.

A dapper Canadian in his mid-fifties, Rob McEwen bought the disparate collection of gold mining companies known as Goldcorp in 1989. A decade later, he'd unified those companies and was ready for expansion - a process he wanted to start by building a new refinery.

If the idea is really new and unique and big, other people will all think it is bad and is going to fail.

If you believe that the developing world deserves the same standards of living that we do in the developed world, then to achieve that, they need resources. They need the metals and the minerals to build the industries and the buildings and so forth, and the energy.

Private industry's job is to make money. Private industry's job is to create a huge economic engine.

You might hear people decry the loss of privacy in today's world, but radical transparency is dramatically reducing violence everywhere. Most violent things happen in the dark when no one's watching, whether it's an oppressive dictator or someone causing violence in the inner city.

So while I can't tell you if bringing a child into this world is the morally-responsible to do, I can say that the future, much like the present, is going to be a whole lot better than you think.

I think the folks who go after grand challenges are impatient.

As lower-cost phones begin to penetrate, they'll become the educator and physician everywhere on the planet.

Since the age of 6, I've always wanted to go to space.

The old newspaper adage, 'If it bleeds, it leads,' is as true today as it was a century ago.

I think about the Internet and cell phones and jets and spaceships, and I wonder, 'What's going to make that look ancient?'

It's never been easier to share your ideas and passions with the world.

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

Your chances of dying a violent death are 1/500th of what they used to be during medieval times.

With sufficient water on the Moon, solar energy can be used to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen is, of course, critical for humans to breathe and the water important for us to drink.

The reason we care so much about what happens to the likes of Lady Gaga is not because her shenanigans will ever impact our lives; rather because our brain doesn't realize there's a difference between rock stars we know about and relatives we know.

The communications industry has been tremendously successful, but we need to build the railroads and the oil wells and the gold mines of space.

The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest market opportunities. And that's a huge thing. Solve hunger, literacy and energy problems, get the gratitude of the world and become a billionaire in the process.

If anyone has seen success and failure on a global stage, it's my friend Steve Forbes.