Paul Graham Quotes

Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.

I don’t predict the demise of object-oriented programming, by the way. Though I don’t think it has much to offer good programmers, except in certain specialized domains, it is irresistible to large organizations. Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches. Large organizations always tend to develop software this way, and I expect this to be as true in a hundred years as it is today.

Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.

you need to start doing something people want. You don’t need to join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It’s doing something people want that matters, not joining the group.6

A significant part of what YC partners do in office hours is to shake loose insights that founders already have.

Something I just told a founder: Stay as small as you can for as long as you can. People who come to visit your office should always be surprised that such an important company has so few employees.

How can you see the wave, when you’re the water?

If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.

In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses.

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

People are bad at looking at seeds and guessing what size tree will grow out of them. The way you’ll get big ideas in, say, health care is by starting out with small ideas. If you try to do some big thing, you don’t just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it’s really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better. And you know what? Empirically, starting big just does not work. That’s the way the government does things. They do something really big that’s really bad, and they think, Well, we’ll make it better, and then it never gets better”.

Building Fast Companies for Growth, Inc. September 2013

If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get exceptional, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.

The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it makes trade work. The disadvantage is that it tends to obscure what trade really means.

If you invested at the peak of the Nasdaq in March 2000, it would have been roughly 18 years before you were whole again: 15 years before the index reached the same point, plus another 3 for inflation.

Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work.