quotes by Paul Graham

"If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid."
— Paul Graham

"There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student."
— Paul Graham (Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)

"Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that techincally inept business types are known as "suits.""
— Paul Graham

"If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies. "
— Paul Graham (Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)