Quotes from Paul Graham

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. — C.S.LEWIS

Startups are not magic. They don't change the laws of wealth creation. They just represent a point at the far end of the curve.

some of those most vocal on the subject of wealth — university students, heirs, professors, politicians, and journalists — have the least experience creating it.

Live in the future, then build what's missing.

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.

Nearly all makers have day jobs early in their careers.

Most struggles, whatever they're really about, will be cast as struggles between competing ideas. The

Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that's unthinkable. Natural

If you're too inexperienced to start a startup, what you should do is start one. That's a way more efficient cure for inexperience than a normal job. In fact, getting a normal job may actually make you less able to start a startup, by turning you into a tame animal who thinks that he needs an office to work in and a product manager to tell him what software to write.

Once you cross the threshold of profitability, however low, your runway becomes infinite.

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.

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

If you look at the dominant technologies today, you'll find that most of them grew organically.

Many things people like, especially if they're young and ambitious, they like largely for the feeling of virtue in liking them. 99% of people reading Ulysses are thinking I'm reading Ulysses as they do it.

think language designers would do better to consider their target user to be a genius who will need to do things they never anticipated, rather than a bumbler who needs to be protected from himself. The bumbler will shoot himself in the foot anyway.

The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery.

One sign that determination matters more than talent: there are lots of talented people who never achieve anything, but not that many determined people who don't.

if the hacker is a creator, we have to take inspiration into account.

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.

Let yourself be second-guessed. When you make any tool, people use it in ways you didn't intend, and this is especially true of a highly articulated tool like a programming language.

Sometimes the current even starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularly in university math and science departments, nerds deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter.

In hacking, like painting, work comes in cycles. Sometimes you get excited about a new project and you want to work sixteen hours a day on it. Other times nothing seems interesting.

I'd like to propose an alternative idea: that in a modern society, increasing variation in income is a sign of health. Technology seems to increase the variation in productivity at faster than linear rates. If we don't see corresponding variation in income, there are three possible explanations: (a) that technical innovation has stopped, (b) that the people who would create the most wealth aren't doing it, or (c) that they aren't getting paid for it.

it was not till the Industrial Revolution that wealth creation definitively replaced corruption as the best way to get rich.