“To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.”

“A vast and abandoned world laid out in anonymous grids and quadrants, a view that confirmed you were much more alone than you thought you were, a view that inspired the flickering thoughts of suicide.”

“Words can be meaningless. If they are used in such a way that no sharp conclusions can be drawn.”

“General assumptions often lead to erroneous conclusions, but one cannot go far wrong in always assuming that whatever one's government is saying is a lie.”

“It has been said that, given two bettors, there is always one thief and one imbecile; that is true in certain cases when one of the two bettors is much better informed than the other, and knows it; but it can easily happen that two men of good faith, in complex matters where they possess exactly the same elements of information, arrive at different conclusions on the probabilities of an event, and that in betting together, each believes…that it is he who is the thief and the other the imbecile.”

“Because there is simply too much information to store in one's head, education must show how to go about learning -- not only how to find and use information, but also how to determine what is worthwhile to investigate in the first place, how to evaluate what one learns, and how to discover its connections to the whole.”