Paul Graham Quotes

Competitors punch you in the jaw, but investors have you by the balls.

"Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that techincally inept business types are known as "suits.

I noticed an interesting equivalence that obtains between two apparently unrelated things. The percentage of live music in restaurants that's not loud enough = the percentage of awards ceremonies that are too short.

The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.

A lot of having taste about something is just caring about it enough to be honest with yourself, so that you can get past "I like what I like" to "Is this actually good?"

Any organization with a large, protected income will tend by default toward administrative bloat. It's the same in government, at Harvard, at Google. Unless you take explicit measures to avoid it, you'll overhire.

1. When you write something intended to be read by an important person, go through it and cut every unnecessary word.

2. The reader of anything you publish is an important person.

I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.

Adults lie constantly to kids. I’m not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why. [...]

A lot of the things adults conceal from smaller children, they conceal because they’d be frightening, not because they want to conceal the existence of such things. Misleading the child is just a byproduct.

This seems one of the most justifiable types of lying adults do to kids. But because the lies are indirect we don’t keep a very strict accounting of them. Parents know they’ve concealed the facts about sex, and many at some point sit their kids down and explain more. But few tell their kids about the differences between the real world and the cocoon they grew up in. Combine this with the confidence parents try to instill in their kids, and every year you get a new crop of 18 year olds who think they know how to run the world.

Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.

The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones.

If you look at the dominant technologies today, you’ll find that most of them grew organically.

Good design looks easy. Like great athletes, great designers make it look easy. Mostly this is an illusion.

If you try to solve a hard problem, the question is not whether you will use a powerful enough language, but whether you will (a) use a powerful language, (b) write a de facto interpreter for one, or (c) yourself become a human compiler for one.

Math and science education is particularly important for social mobility, because proficiency in these subjects is much harder to fake. A semi-smart rich kid can learn how to sound like he knows a lot about literature, but this is impossible with math.