“‎If you regard evidence as a constraint and seek to free yourself, you sell yourself into the chains of your whims. For you cannot make a true map of a city by sitting in your bedroom with your eyes shut and drawing lines upon paper according to impulse.”

“No..." said Professor Quirrell. "That is not why I am here. You have made no effort to hide your dislike for me, Miss Granger. I thank you for that lack of pretense, for I much prefer true hate to false love.”

“...if you're unhappy whenever other people don't picture you exactly the same way you picture yourself, that's already dooming yourself to always be unhappy. No one ever thinks of us just the same way we think of ourselves.”

“Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.”

“Not every change is an improvement but every improvement is a change; you can't do anything BETTER unless you can manage to do it DIFFERENTLY, you've got to let yourself do better than other people!”

“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...”

“It is time," said the Lord Pilot, "to see this calamity to its end." Spoken in Archaic English: the words uttered by Thomas Clarkson in 1785, at the beginning of the end of slavery. "I have set my will against this disaster; I will break it, or it will break me." Ira Howard in 2014. "I will not share my universe with this shadow," and that was the Lord Pilot, in an anger hotter than the nova's ashes. "Help me if you will, or step aside if you lack decisiveness; but do not make yourself my obstacle, or I will burn you down, and any that stand with you -”