Paul Graham Quotes

But it was not till the Industrial Revolution that wealth creation definitively replaced corruption as the best way to get rich. In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called “corruption”) when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich.

A large part of what big companies pay extra for is the cost of selling expensive things to them.

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.

The difference between design and research seems to be a question of new versus good.

Unknowing imitation is almost a recipe for bad design. If you don’t know where your ideas are coming from, you’re probably imitating an imitator.

Technology had made it possible to create wealth faster than you could steal it. The prototypical rich man of the nineteenth century was not a courtier but an industrialist.

Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they’ll tend to become nerds.

But here there is another layer that tends to obscure the underlying reality. In a company, the work you do is averaged together with a lot of other people’s.

and for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together to go hunting. They don’t actually hate you. They just need something to chase.

Seventeenth-century England was much like the third world today, in that government office was a recognized route to wealth. The great fortunes of that time still derived more from what we would now call corruption than from commerce.11 By the nineteenth century that had changed.

You can’t let the suits make technical decisions for you.

People commonly use the word 'procrastination' to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don’t call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.

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.

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.

What made the Florentines rich in 1200 was the discovery of new techniques for making the high-tech product of the time, fine woven cloth. What made the Dutch rich in 1600 was the discovery of shipbuilding and navigation techniques that enabled them to dominate the seas of the Far East.