Contrarian Quotes

My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more. ~ Peter Thiel

A contrarian approach is just as foolish as a follow-the-crowd strategy. What's required is thinking rather than polling. ~ Warren Buffett

I swim against the tide because I like to annoy. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Value investing is at its core the marriage of a contrarian streak and a calculator. ~ Seth Klarman

The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself. ~ Peter Thiel

That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and - it often seems - social consensus that equates all education with training for increased productivity, only makes academe a still more promising environment for a contrarian. ~ Will Self

I have followed my heart my whole life - the crazy kid, a contrarian by nature, and I've been in trouble in points in my career. ~ Sarah Carter

When I was young, I had this contrarian thing, and my music for a long time was an extension of that. I didn't want to entertain people; I had too much vanity to be an entertainer. I think that some layers of vanity came off. ~ J. Tillman

Ben was really a contrarian but he didn't use those terms because he was really buying value. ~ Walter Schloss

I got told by pretty much everyone I knew that, if I'm going to be out in L.A., working, you need a car. So I was thinking, I'm going to try and not get a car, just because I'm a contrarian that way. ~ Alfred Enoch

I am a contrarian. ~ Barry Diller

World-changing startups need to be premised on accurate contrarian theories. ~ Reid Hoffman

The main reason that we felt positive was because all of the trends were so negative. This was not just to be stubbornly or rigidly contrarian - because being a true contrarian means not to go slavishly against the grain, but to be always independent in your thinking. It was simply that we and the short-term smart money were operating according to different time frames. ~ Mark Mobius

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

I am something of a contrarian, I suppose. I feel less comfortable when everybody agrees with me. I say, 'I better reexamine my position!' I probably believe that the worst opinions in my court have been unanimous. Because there's nobody on the other side pointing out all the flaws. ~ Antonin Scalia

One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it. This criticism would be effortless if there were no "people" waiting for just such an appeal. Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it. And the fact that kings and bishops and billionaires often have more say than most in forming appetites and emotions of the crowd is not irrelevant, either. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Try your hardest to combat atrophy and routine. To question The Obvious and the given is an essential element of the maxim 'de omnius dubitandum' [All is to be doubted]. ~ Christopher Hitchens

To succeed as a contrarian you must recognize what the crowd believes, have concrete justification for why the majority is wrong, and have the patience and conviction to stick with what is, by definition, an unpopular bet. ~ Whitney Tilson

I mean, I'm not a contrarian. ~ Lorenzo Di Bonaventura

To a contrarian like me, constant advice not to do something almost always starts me quickly down the risky, unpopular path. ~ Michael Bloomberg

(John) Adams acknowledged that he had made himself obnoxious to many of his colleagues, who regarded him as a one-man bonfire of the vanities. This never troubled Adams, who in his more contrarian moods claimed that his unpopularity provided clinching evidence that his position was principled, because it was obvious that he was not courting popular opinion. His alienation, therefore, was a measure of his integrity. ~ Joseph J. Ellis

Because even among contrarians, I'm a contrarian. But all of this is just words of bronze, third place rhetoric. What do I really mean when I say we want to shock society into awareness? Do we mean we want more originality and individuality? Less TV, more reading, writing, actual thinking? Less sheep, more shepherd pie? Yes, yes, and a little more pie, please. Oh, and some more sweet tea, too ~ Jarod Kintz

My final word is for the readers. The Tearling is not an easy world, I know. Contrarian that I am, I am determined to make thins kingdom echo life, where answers to our questions are not delivered neatly in a beautiful expositional package, but must be earned, through experience and frustration, sometimes even tears (and believe me, not all of those tears are Kelsea's). Sometimes answers never come at all. To all of the readers who stuck with this story, understanding and sometimes even enjoying the fact that the Tearling is a gradually unfolding world, full of lost and often confounding history, thank you for your faith in the concept. I hope that your patience was rewarded in the end. Now let's all go and make a better world." (Afterwords of the author) ~ Erika Johansen

I'm part of the fashion system, but I don't want to follow all the rules. I don't want to be contrarian - I just want to do my own things, which are most honest and correct to do. ~ Dries Van Noten

...a final word to "the children": do you want to get suckered like your big brothers and sisters? Those saps who spent 2008 standing behind the Obamessiah swaying and chanting, "We are the dawning of the Hopeychange" like brainwashed cult extras? Sooner or later you guys have to crawl out from under the social engineering and rediscover the contrarian spirit for which youth was once known...This will be the great battle of the next generation--to reclaim your birthright from those who spent it. If you don't, the entire global order will teeter and fall. But, if you do, you will have won a great victory. Every time a politician proposes new spending, tell him he's already spent your money, get his hand out of your pocket. Every time a politician says you can stay a child until your twenty-seventh birthday, tell him, "No, you're the big baby, not me--you've spent irresponsibly, and me and my pals are the ones who are gonna have to be the adults and clean up your mess. Don't treat met like a kid when your immaturity got us into this hole." This is a battle for the American idea, and it's an epic one, but--to reprise the lamest of lame-o-lines--you can do anything you want to do. So do it. ~ Mark Steyn

The urge to be contrarian was strong. If she set herself apart, perhaps she would be less of the person she feared she had become. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

When your views are truly contrarian, they are inevitably uncomfortable. Courage and the ability to withstand pain are required, ~ Michael Steinhardt

In order to win as a contrarian, you need perfect timing and the perfect size. ~ Henrique M. Simoes

He was a conservative all right, but invariably he gave the impression that he was a conservative because he was surrounded by liberals; that he had been a revolutionist if that had been required in order to be socially disruptive. ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

Contrarian thinking at its best simply asks, Is this really true? It speaks up when the politically correct answer or the conventional wisdom doesn't match reality - when things simply don't work the way everyone says they should. ~ Larry Osborne

I don't really know much about pirates, or pirate culture. I'd be a contrarian pirate. ~ Todd Barry

So successful has the ideological-political-cultural purge been executed that it is hard indeed to find vigorous liberals, and no energetic, coherent and cogent leftists at all can find expression in our controlled media and educational systems. Forget about wholesale culture- or civilization-critics like Marxists. Universities have to be purged of any "radicalism" that can see through to the roots of issues and pathologies, for the same reasons that workers have to have nascent unions aborted among them and contrarian newspapers and media have to be starved of advertising. ~ Kenny Smith

The best opportunities are often ones where you're being contrarian. That doesn't mean being contrarian for contrarian's sake, but it means you're thoughtful about the risks of following the crowd. ~ David Sze

I guess I much prefer the path of the contrarian: the guy who goes against the grain a bit. The careers of the people who I admire deeply - like the Coen brothers and Soderbergh - don't repeat themselves, and they make radically different films at times, and I think that's wonderful. ~ Joe Carnahan

When everyone is a contrarian, nobody is a contrarian ~ Mark Skousen

The overwhelming majority of people are comfortable with consensus, but successful investors tend to have a contrarian bent, ~ Seth Klarman

No matter what I tend to be doing, generally people always think I'm crazy, first of all, because I'm always talking about things in the future that haven't happened yet, and people have a hard time believing what's gonna happen. Secondly, I'm almost always a contrarian, whatever direction everybody else is going in, I'm probably figuring out a way to go in a completely opposite direction. ~ Trip Hawkins

The only way to consistently stay ahead of the game is to adopt a long-term view and, if appropriate, with a strong contrarian spin. ~ Mark Mobius

"Cynicism," like "heresy" and "heterodoxy" and "atheism" and "agnosticism" and "paganism" and "heathenism," is above all else a way for organized orthodoxy's caste of official censors to encyst and segregate and thus neutralize all contrarian forms of seeing and thinking, all (necessarily implicitly) prohibited and repressed ways of exercising disruptive and iconoclastic intuition and intellection (for to analyze and explain these things too openly is to give them publicity and potential cogency when the point is to asphyxiate them). ~ Kenny Smith

As an investor-entrepreneur, I've always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking. ~ Peter Thiel

If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth. ~ Peter Thiel

Ultimately the most profound problems with psychotherapy have always been that instead of possessing any contrarian or transcendent values to enable it to produce insights countervailing against our dysfunctional and incoherent and humanly destructive culture, its "therapists" have been virtually all shills or agents for this culture, trying to accommodate their patients to a fundamentally unhealthy and insane way of life. ~ Kenny Smith

Not a 'Mad Men' guy. Never got into it. I'm kind of a contrarian that way. If something gets too popular too fast before I can get on it, I just get really annoyed. Everybody tells me I'm an idiot; it's supposed to be amazing. I saw some of the second season; I loved it, but I was just detached. I didn't get into it. ~ D.J. Cotrona

Contrarian thinking doesn't make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up. ~ Peter Thiel

Defending unpopular positions is what lawyers do ~ Paul Clement

Pseudoscience is almost always recognizable from a distance, and easy to confirm on close examination. Science is, however, not immune from hubris, and bad science can be tougher to spot. Those of us who make a living from science or science media must display scientific integrity. We must constantly test our assumptions and fight the siren song of consensus when our data tells us to be contrarian. We must remain independent of political or religious bias in evaluating our work. We must admit when we are wrong, and remain willing to evolve when verifiable data demands change. We must admit when we are uncertain, remain humble in advances, and offer courageous and independent advice grounded in science. ~ K. Lee Lerner

I have a slightly contrarian streak as a writer, and one of the things I was interested in was how distilled could I make a life, and how I could cross what is kind of trivialized as a domestic novel with a novel of ideas, a philosophical novel. ~ Jenny Offill

Value investing by its very nature is contrarian. ~ Seth Klarman