Top 55 Contrarian Quotes
#1. 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
#2. In public market investing, as in many things, you achieve big success when you're both contrarian and right.
Reid Hoffman
#3. I do look for openings where I can overturn popular misconceptions, but unlike Christopher Hitchens, I am neither a contrarian nor a lone heretic. I like to have a significant number of academics watching my back.
Steven Pinker
#5. Don't be afraid of developing a contrarian viewpoint on what type of person is perfect for your company as CTO and how you're going to find that person.
Mariam Naficy
#6. It's an interesting dynamic living in New York in general as a Boston fan. It's kind of fun that way. It's fun to be the contrarian when everyone hates you as long as your team is winning.
Katie Nolan
#7. To a contrarian like me, constant advice not to do something almost always starts me quickly down the risky, unpopular path.
Michael Bloomberg
#8. I've actually always wanted to write like a one-person show that was sort of a romantic comedy - a show that was kind of cynical about romance and marriage but ultimately embraced it. Because I feel like comedy is always cynical, inherently, because it's contrarian.
Mike Birbiglia
#9. A contrarian at heart, I am often guided by what I disagree with and don't want.
Rebecca Solnit
#10. I think what's always important is not to be contrarian for its own sake but to really get at the truth.
Peter Thiel
#11. The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
Peter Thiel
#12. 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
#13. When you're young, you want to make every kind of film: musicals, Westerns, horror. Slowly you begin to hear your own voice. I hope people receive what I do as small, personal films that are somewhat contrarian about their main characters.
Jason Reitman
#14. When everyone is a contrarian, nobody is a contrarian
Mark Skousen
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. It's very conventional to say that you're a contrarian these days.
Reid Hoffman
#19. 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
#20. By nominating Chuck Hagel to be his Defense secretary, President Obama is putting forward an aloof contrarian who doesn't suffer fools - a striving politician who considers himself above politics.
Ron Fournier
#21. Ben was really a contrarian but he didn't use those terms because he was really buying value.
Walter Schloss
#22. I don't really know much about pirates, or pirate culture. I'd be a contrarian pirate.
Todd Barry
#23. If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.
Peter Thiel
#24. 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
#25. In order to win as a contrarian, you need perfect timing and the perfect size.
Henrique M. Simoes
#26. When your views are truly contrarian, they are inevitably uncomfortable. Courage and the ability to withstand pain are required,
Michael Steinhardt
#27. I don't think of myself as a trendy person at all, and if I'm anything, I'm probably contrarian.
Alfred Enoch
#28. World-changing startups need to be premised on accurate contrarian theories.
Reid Hoffman
#29. 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
#30. A contrarian approach is just as foolish as a follow-the-crowd strategy. What's required is thinking rather than polling.
Warren Buffett
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. The very act of becoming an entrepreneur is contrarian to middle class values, study hard, get a good job, be happy with secure income and steady salary.
Rashmi Bansal
#34. The wide multitude wanted to seem contrarian. It meant that this type of nonconformism had to be mass-produced.
Andy Warhol
#35. It's actually pretty easy to be contrarian. It's hard to be contrarian and right.
Reid Hoffman
#36. I'll work with anyone - and I really do mean that - Democrat, Republican, independent, Libertarian, contrarian, vegetarian.
Elizabeth Warren
#37. 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
#38. Value investing is at its core the marriage of a contrarian streak and a calculator.
Seth Klarman
#39. Value investing by its very nature is contrarian.
Seth Klarman
#40. 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
#41. The late Christopher Hitchens had the professional contrarian's fixation on attacking sacred cows, and rather soon after his cancer diagnosis, he became one himself.
Alex Pareene
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. Contrarian thinking doesn't make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up.
Peter Thiel
#45. The overwhelming majority of people are comfortable with consensus, but successful investors tend to have a contrarian bent,
Seth Klarman
#46. I'm a bit of a contrarian, so I like the idea of going on stage without makeup, without the hair being done, in the jeans and shirt I've been wearing all day. At first that was an issue, because I didn't want to be disrespectful.
Lou Doillon
#47. Successful contrarian investing requires us to live with discomfort, for being "wrong" and alone. But bargains do not exist in the absence of fear.
Robert D. Arnott
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Go with your gut instincts even if it is contrarian to what the "experts" suggest.
Jim Rohn
#51. The spirit of my films ... I always want them to be kind of contrarian. Meticulous on the one hand, but unbelievably sloppy and careless on the other. I guess that's what you get anyway, if you're not planning very much.
Guy Maddin
#53. 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.
#54. I've never walked the same path other people found comfortable and I'm not going to start now.
Lora Leigh
#55. 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
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