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Paul Graham Quotes (1964-)
Author, King, Scientist
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.
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Paul Graham quotes.
“Consulting is where product companies go to die.”
“Competitors punch you in the jaw, but investors have you by the balls.”
“There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating grad student.”
“If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies.”
“A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of.”
“Google never did any advertising. They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they know better than to use it themselves.”
“I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you.”
“Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending. There are exceptions of course, but usually the way to win is to race ahead, not to stop and fight.”
“Software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software. If you can't design software as well as implement it, don't start a startup.”
“If you work on something you can finish in a day or two, you can expect to have a nice feeling of accomplishment fairly soon. If the reward is indefinitely far in the future, it seems less real.”
“European public opinion will apparently tolerate people being fired in industries where they really care about performance. Unfortunately the only industry they care enough about so far is soccer.”
“Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.”
“The other thing that's different about the real world [compared to high school] is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together.”
“As a rule of thumb, the more qualifiers there are before the name of a country, the more corrupt the rulers. A country called The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably the last place in the world you'd want to live.”
“Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.”
Paul Graham Quotes by Topic
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Paul Graham on Startup company 2 quotes
“Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending. There are exceptions of course, but usually the way to win is to race ahead, not to stop and fight.”
Paul Graham on Lisp (programming language)
“Java was, as Gosling says in the first Java white paper, designed for average programmers. It's a perfectly legitimate goal to design a language for average programmers. (Or for that matter for small children, like Logo.) But it is also a legitimate, and very different, goal to design a language for good programmers.”
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Paul Graham on Java (programming language)
“Java was, as Gosling says in the first Java white paper, designed for average programmers. It's a perfectly legitimate goal to design a language for average programmers. (Or for that matter for small children, like Logo.) But it is also a legitimate, and very different, goal to design a language for good programmers.”
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Paul Graham on Architecture
“Architects know that some kinds of design problems are more personal than others. One of the cleanest, most abstract design problems is designing bridges. There your job is largely a matter of spanning a given distance with the least material. The other end of the spectrum is designing chairs. Chair designers have to spend their time thinking about human butts.”
Paul Graham on Essay
“The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course.”
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.