Contrarian Thinking Quotes

We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.

If someone gives you so-called good advice, do the opposite; you can be sure it will be the right thing nine out of 10 times.

Watch what everyone else does--do the opposite. The majority is always wrong.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

Buy when there's blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own.

Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.

Knowledge we have. Anyone who strives for it with particular intensity is suspect of striving against it.

Thinking about how disturbingly herdlike people become in so many different contexts - mimetic theory forces you to think about that, which is knowledge that's generally suppressed and hidden. 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.

If I hear someone say something, and they're 100 per cent about it, then it's almost inevitable that I'll take the opposite view. I guess I feel at odds with things like society. Absolutism is always a trigger for me.

While everyone else is thinking about economics and politics, executive salaries and the future of the euro, do the opposite, even if it's hard. Invest in the spirit.

Go with your gut instincts even if it is contrarian to what the "experts" suggest.

If Eric thinks I did something right, I must have done it wrong.

When you think about being contrarian, you have to think about - how is it that smart people will disagree with me, disagree with me ...from a position of intelligence, and there is something that I know that they don't know, that will actually in fact play out to be true.

I've done that my whole life - I've taken the way people think and turned it on its head.

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

Beware [of] the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns.

Whatever anyone says, I think the opposite will happen.

It’s actually pretty easy to be contrarian. It’s hard to be contrarian and right.

Not every obnoxious talk leads to progress, but we cannot tell which unusual idea, which seditious thought will be tomorrow's accepted truth and enshrined right ... after all, all that we take for granted, was once deemed extremely objectionable... So, not knowing where the next big step in the progress of human civilization will come from, we open our ears, our minds and our hearts to the new, the unusual and the contrarian.

If everyone thinks one way, it is likely to be wrong. If you can figure out that it is wrong, you are likely to make a lot of money.

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you're headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.

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

you may take it as an axiom that you cannot profit in Wall Street by continuously doing the obvious or the popular thing

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.

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