Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do.

Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do.

Small-business customers are very conservative and very cheap. We don't have to explain ourselves for the most part.

Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as 'suits'.

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete.

A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.

We don't have to go that far to sell our beer because our immediate accounts sell so much. Places that sold 10 cases before, now they're selling 30.

Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired.

I get a lot of criticism for telling founders to focus first on making something great, instead of worrying about how to make money. And yet that is exactly what Google did. And Apple, for that matter. You'd think examples like that would be enough to convince people.

If you could replace high-school yearbooks, that could be a lot of money. It's so clearly waiting for someone to come along.

If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.

If you really understand something, you can say it in the fewest words, instead of thrashing about.

In the startup world, 'not working' is normal.

It's hard to say exactly what it is about face-to-face contact that makes deals happen, but whatever it is, it hasn't yet been duplicated by technology.

Like having a child, running a startup is the sort of experience that's hard to imagine unless you've done it yourself.

One startup I dream of funding is the one that kills the record companies.

Some people just get what they want in the world.

Startups often have to do dubious things.

There are plenty of smart people who get nowhere.

What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.

When Facebook first started, and it was just a social directory for undergrads at Harvard, it would have seemed like such a bad startup idea, like some student side project.

You know your business model is broken when you're suing your customers.

The way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things.

Relentlessly prune bullshit, don’t wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have.

This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices choose the harder.

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.

You know your business model is broken when youre suing your customers.

In programming the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve.

A person's fears are lighter when the danger is at hand.

With the success of the last three or so years, when a lot of people start treating you differently, there's a danger that you may start to think of yourself differently. You rely on your friends to say, 'Hey, wake up!'

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

The best way to avoid danger is to meet it plump.

General Sherman looked upon journalists as a nuisance and a danger at headquarters and in the field, and acted toward them accordingly, then as throughout his great war career.

The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish.

It wouldn't sit easily on one's conscience that you had been warned and there could be danger, but nevertheless you went ahead and said let's dispense these drugs.

By increasing the size of the keyhole, today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.

Terrorism is a big danger to Pakistan's independence. We will fight this danger for the sake of independence of Pakistan and will defeat it at all levels.

The United States stands with our friends in Britain as they recover from today's shock of terrorism. These barbaric acts strengthen our resolve and remind us all of the danger of complacency during our continued war on terror.

In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.

It is a high patriotic duty that we support and sustain the men who have been placed in position of difficulty, burden, responsibility, and even danger as the result of our suffrages.

Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do.

I did not imagine that the second half of my life would be spent on efforts to avert a mortal danger to humanity created by science.

The proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger.

Putin can't afford to leave the office because he will be in real danger of being prosecuted for things he and his people did during their stay in power.

There was never any danger of Business 2.0 ever going under.

We... our war began September the 3rd 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and thereafter the great state of danger in England at that time, with the bombings, necessitated the evacuation of children.

The danger of that - and there's a grave danger that I, myself, have to be very aware of - is that you become so involved and intrigued in the language that sometimes you lose track that that is only a means to an aesthetic experience that the listener has to get.

Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory.