Top 50 Paul Graham Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly, but working for a large company is like being waterboarded.”

— Paul Graham

Featured in: Startup Quotes, Challenges Quotes

2. “The most important thing is not to let fundraising get you down. Startups live or die on morale. If you let the difficulty of raising money destroy your morale, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

— Paul Graham

Featured in: Startup Quotes, Inspirational Business Quotes, Stay Positive Quotes

3. “Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.”

— Paul Graham

4. “The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.”

— Paul Graham

5. “When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.”

— Paul Graham

6. “There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student.”

— Paul Graham

7. “The phrase “personal computer” is part of the language now, but when it was first used it had a deliberately audacious sound, like the phrase “personal satellite” would today.”

— Paul Graham

8. “The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.”

— Paul Graham

9. “The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.”

— Paul Graham

10. “To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.”

— Paul Graham

11. “It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.”

— Paul Graham

12. “The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.”

— Paul Graham

13. “It’s important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It’s all-encompassing, like life, but it isn’t the real thing. It’s only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you’re still in it.”

— Paul Graham

14. “Here, as so often, the best defense is a good offense. If you can develop technology that’s simply too hard for competitors to duplicate, you don’t need to rely on other defenses. Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice.”

— Paul Graham

15. “Hackers are unruly. That is the essence of hacking. And it is also the essence of Americanness. It is no accident that Silicon Valley is in America, and not France, or Germany, or England, or Japan. In those countries, people color inside the lines.”

— Paul Graham

16. “You have to be able to see things from the user’s point of view.”

— Paul Graham

17. “In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don’t understand. In business, as in war, surprise is worth as much as force.”

— Paul Graham

18. “There are plenty of other ways to get money, including chance, speculation, marriage, inheritance, theft, extortion, fraud, monopoly, graft, lobbying, counterfeiting, and prospecting. Most of the greatest fortunes have probably involved several of these.”

— Paul Graham

19. “The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well.”

— Paul Graham

20. “People who write about politics, whether on the left or the right, have a consistent bias: they take politics seriously.”

— Paul Graham

21. “You might find contradictory taboos. In one culture it might seem shocking to think x, while in another it was shocking not to. But I think usually the shock is on one side. In one culture x is ok, and in another it’s considered shocking. My hypothesis is that the side that’s shocked is most likely to be the mistaken one.”

— Paul Graham

22. “Keep your identity small.”

— Paul Graham

23. “Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.”

— Paul Graham

24. “I’m not saying there’s no such thing as genius. But if you’re trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.”

— Paul Graham

25. “People who do good work often think that whatever they’re working on is no good. Others see what they’ve done and think it’s wonderful, but the creator sees nothing but flaws. This pattern is no coincidence: worry made the work good.”

— Paul Graham

26. “Cold War teaches the same lesson as World War II and, for that matter, most wars in recent history. Don’t let a ruling class of warriors and politicians squash the entrepreneurs. The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.”

— Paul Graham

27. “Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.”

— Paul Graham

28. “Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.”

— Paul Graham

29. “Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you’ve lost the source of. It works, but you don’t know why.”

— Paul Graham

30. “So if you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they’ll never be able to keep up with you. These opportunities are not easy to find, though. It’s hard to engage a big company in a design war, just as it’s hard to engage an opponent inside a castle in hand-to-hand combat.”

— Paul Graham

31. “This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses. When those far removed from the creation of wealth – undergraduates, reporters, politicians – hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.”

— Paul Graham

32. “Programmers tend to be divided into tribes by the languages they use. More even than by the kinds of programs they write.”

— Paul Graham

Featured in: Programming Quotes

33. “Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens.”

— Paul Graham

34. “If you’re in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get exceptional, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.”

— Paul Graham

35. “In a big company, you can do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can’t do what all the other startups do.”

— Paul Graham

36. “Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel.”

— Paul Graham

37. “Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I’ve read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.”

— Paul Graham

38. “We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners.”

— Paul Graham

39. “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.”

— Paul Graham

40. “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.”

— Paul Graham

41. “One of the less publicized benefits of the open source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program.”

— Paul Graham

42. “If you have to choose between two theories, prefer the one that doesn’t center on you.”

— Paul Graham

43. “Could civil liberties really be a cause, rather than just an effect? I think so. I think a society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient so- lutions win, rather than those sponsored by the most influential people. Authoritarian countries become corrupt; corrupt countries become poor; and poor countries are weak.”

— Paul Graham

44. “Most makers make things for a human audience. And to engage an audience you have to understand what they need.”

— Paul Graham

45. “A lot of the statements that got people in trouble seem harmless now.”

— Paul Graham

46. “To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn’t need taboos to protect it. It’s not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo.”

— Paul Graham

47. “If a writer rewrites an essay, people who read the new version are unlikely to complain that their thoughts have been broken by some newly introduced incompatibility.”

— Paul Graham

48. “It’s easier to get people to fight for an idea. And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the victor.”

— Paul Graham

49. “Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.”

— Paul Graham

50. “Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders.”

— Paul Graham