Contrarian Thinking Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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 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

"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

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

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

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

Decision making brings together many of the finest traits of contrarian leadership
thinking gray, thinking free, artful listening, delegating authority while retaining ultimate responsibility,artful procrastination, ignoring sunk costs, taking luck into account, and listening to one's inner voice. Weaving these traits together is an art itself. When it is done well, the result is a thing of beauty and a powerful tool for effective leadership. — Steven B. Sample

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