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.

Today's 'best practices' lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.

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

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present.

I do think Bitcoin is the first [encrypted money] that has the potential to do something like change the world.

Every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.

In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today.

Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.

The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it.

Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school.

To be called insane: challenge convention. To be called possessed: challenge religion.

I don't give a damn about any actors. What good will John Barrymore do you with the bases loaded and two down in a tight ball game. Either I get the money (more than Barrymore), or I don't play!

I was never really that interested in the punk movement. I was a blues guy: I liked Motown, James Brown.

I've done my job extremely well. My only beef is that a lot of people have put their fingers in whatever I've done and tried to screw it up, and I've always resented that.

Often when something is going on behind the scenes and people fight for change, the fight will go on and on and on until they understand the mechanism that they're actually fighting against.

I never get too high on my stardom or what I can do.

I love connecting with the fans. I love being on stage.

When somebody has convinced you that you're not worth anything to anybody anymore, and they spend a lot of time doing it, you start believing it yourself.

Every word is part of a picture, Every sentence is a picture. All you have to do is link them together.

Our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of taxpayers' money into the mail-order catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay.