Paul Graham Quotes

Competition can be an effective motivator, but don't let it choose the problem for you. Don't let yourself get drawn into chasing something merely because there's a lot of competition for it.

European public opinion will apparently tolerate people being fired in industries where they really care about performance. Unfortunately the only industry they care enough about so far is soccer.

The spirit of resistance to government,” Jefferson wrote, “is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.

We can't assume that if we had a single world government, the world would look like Europe and grow like America. More likely it would look like America and grow like Europe.

Language policing is so creepy. You can tell the people who do it aren't real writers, or they could never produce the horrible rules they come up with. It's like priests telling people how to have sex.

The artist who occupies the most space in my brain is Stanley Badmin. Almost every day I look at the world and think "Badmin."

In reality, wealth is measured by what one delivers, not how much effort it costs. If I paint someone’s house, the owner shouldn’t pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush.

Implementing something doesn't guarantee that you understand it, but it's among the best evidence that you do.

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

Who thinks they’re not open-minded? Our hypothetical prim miss from the suburbs thinks she’s open-minded. Hasn’t she been taught to be? Ask anyone, and they’ll say the same thing: they’re pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong. (Some tribes may avoid “wrong” as judgemental, and may instead use a more neutral sounding euphemism like “negative” or “destructive”.)

When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don’t know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite.

People's irrational dislike of shipping charges seems so powerful that it would be worth thinking about what new things it could drive.

In practice I think it’s easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty.

It annoys me when teachers require kids to use laborious, prescribed methods to calculate things (and to "show their work" to prove they did) because it teaches kids not to see the patterns that exist in the numbers.

The easiest people to trick are those who want to believe something false.

Someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.