Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

Sometimes Harry thought the deepest split in his personality wasn't anything to do with his dark side; rather it was the divide between the altruistic and forgiving Abstract Reasoning Harry, versus the frustrated and angry Harry In The Moment.

For an instant Harry imagined... Just for an instant, before his imagination blew a fuse and called an emergency shut down and told him never to imagine that again.

People form close friendships by knowing private things about each other, and the reason most people don't make close friends is because they're too embarrassed to share anything really important about themselves.

I only want power so I can get books.

I'm lazy! I hate work! Hate hard work in all its forms! Clever shortcuts, that's all I'm about!

And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star they won’t tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they’re old enough to bear it and when they learn they’ll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed

What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.

A friend isn't someone you use once and then throw away, a friend is someone you use over and over again.

To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.

In a moral dilemma where you lost something either way, making the choice would feel bad either way, so you could temporarily save yourself a little mental pain by refusing to decide. At the cost of not being able to plan anything in advance, and at the cost of incurring a huge bias toward inaction or waiting until too late...

Most Muggles lived in a world defined by the limits of what you could do with cars and telephones. Even though Muggle physics explicitly permitted possibilities like molecular nanotechnology or the Penrose process for extracting energy from black holes, most people filed that away in the same section of their brain that stored fairy tales and history books, well away from their personal realities: Long ago and far away, ever so long ago.

There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! WE care! There IS light in the world, and it is US!