Paul Graham Quotes

A job means doing something people want, averaged together with everyone else in that company.

This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses. When those far removed from the creation of wealth — undergraduates, reporters, politicians — hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.

When mechanical watches became obsolete around 1970 they represented almost exactly 700 years of refinement by some of the best minds of their time. That is a really long run.

no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.”1

To write good software you must simultaneously keep two opposing ideas in your head. You need the young hacker’s naive faith in his abilities, and at the same time the veteran’s skepticism.

If you want me to ignore your email, put the word "opportunity" in the subject line. If you want to make doubly sure, put "exclusive" in there too.

One of the most interesting (and also frightening) things about AI is how difficult it is to predict what will happen. My kids ask me what's going to happen, and all I can say is that there will be huge changes, and I can't predict what they'll be.

It's exhausting to be lied to. I think some of the most accomplished liars even take advantage of this fact. Their lies then serve a double purpose: (a) whatever purpose each specific lie serves and (b) to exhaust their audience and thereby batter them into submission.

Your teachers are always telling you [high school students] to behave like adults. I wonder if they'd like it if you did. You may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile compared to adults.... Imagine the reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go at a time.

You can go anywhere in books

I suspect few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them. You see the same thing in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for their own designers to use. Cobol, Ada, and Javawere created for other people to use. If you think you’re designing
something for idiots, odds are you’re not designing something good, even for idiots.

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.

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.