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… - Paul Graham
""
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.
English
Collect this quote
About
Paul Graham
Paul Graham (born 1964) is an English computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. He is best known for his work on the programming language Lisp, his former startup Viaweb (later renamed Yahoo! Store), cofounding the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his essays, and Hacker News.
Biography information from
Wikiquote·
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, Crédit photo: Sarah Harlin (Public domain / CC0)
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Shorter versions of this quote
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.
it was not till the Industrial Revolution that wealth creation definitively replaced corruption as the best way to get rich.
A restaurant can afford to serve the occasional burnt dinner. But in technology, you cook one thing and that's what everyone eats. So any difference between what people want and what you deliver is multiplied. You please or annoy customers wholesale. The closer you can get to what they want, the more wealth you generate.
Swag is no good if no one uses it, so put that before cost or branding. The reason YC t-shirts are gray instead of orange is simply that the gray shirts were softer.
Works in ChatGPT, Claude, or Any AI
Add semantic quote search to your AI assistant via MCP. One command setup.
The government spying on people doesn’t literally make programmers write worse code. It just leads eventually to a world in which bad ideas will win. And because this is so important to hackers, they’re especially sensitive to it. They can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm.
