“The observation of the numerous misfortunes that attend all conditions forbids us to grow insolent upon our present enjoyments, or to admire a man's happiness that may yet, in course of time, suffer change. For the uncertain future has yet to come, with all variety of future; and to him only to whom the divinity has [guaranteed] continued happiness until the end we may call happy.”

“Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize that someone will laugh at their beliefs in the (disappointingly near) future.”

“If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?”

“My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal”

“As a matter of fact, your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call "positive effect", then on their intensity when they hit. In other words, good news is good news first. How good matters rather little. So to have a pleasant life you should spread those small effects across time as evenly as possible. Plenty of mildly good news is preferable to one single lump of great news. The same is property in reverse applies to our unhappiness. It is better to lump all your pain into a brief period, rather than have it spread out over a long time.”

“Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future, but that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away. Ergo we do not know what we will know.”

“. . . the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects.”