“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 -”

“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.”

“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!”

“- With respect, Professor McGonagall, I'm not quite sure you understand what I'm trying to do here.- With respect, Mr. Potter, I'm quite sure I don't. Unless - this is a guess, mind - you're trying to take over the world?- No! I mean yes - well, NO!- I think i should perhaps be alarmed that you have trouble answering the question.”

“I see little hope for democracy as an effective form of government, but I admire the poetry of how it makes its victims complicit in their own destruction.”

“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.”

“‎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.”