Paul Graham Quotes

Some of the most successful founders start out tentative and lukewarm. Especially the young ones, who are often far from certain they want to run a startup. As they should be, because it's not for everyone, and they don't know yet what they like.

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

Many if not most philosophical controversies are artifacts of trying to using natural language at a higher resolution than it will support.

The reason PowerPoint is so popular is the same reason Bezos banned it: it saves you from having to think.

GOOD DESIGN IS SIMPLE. You hear this from math to painting. In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one. Where axioms are concerned, especially, less is more. It means much the same thing in programming. For architects and designers, it means that beauty should depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements rather than a profusion of superficial ornament.

If I had a choice of living in a society where I was materially much better off than I am now, but was among the poorest, or in one where I was the richest, but much worse off than I am now, I’d take the first option. If I had children, it would arguably be immoral not to. It’s absolute poverty you want to avoid, not relative poverty.

When someone's audience derives mostly from complaining about some narrow set of problems, they have less incentive to fix them, or even acknowledge progress other people make toward fixing them.

To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn’t need taboos to protect it. It’s not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo.

It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.

If you look at history, it seems that most people who got rich by creating wealth did it by developing new technology. You just can’t fry eggs or cut hair fast enough.

If you're trying to sell a domain name, quote a price. I often help startups find new names, and we always just skip the names that say "make offer." A name is not even interesting until you know what it costs.

There are plenty of other ways to get money, including chance, speculation, marriage, inheritance, theft, extortion, fraud, monopoly, graft, lobbying, counterfeiting, and prospecting. Most of the greatest fortunes have probably involved several of these.

A startup is like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing : to score. No energy is wasted on defense. The defense of mosquitos, as a species, is that there are a lot of them, but this is little consolation to the individual mosquito.

The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it.

If you want to make money, you tend to be forced to work on problems that are too nasty for anyone to solve for free.