Lars > Lars's Quotes

“The wages of sin is Death.” Gotcha! The wages of everything is Death! This is a Communist universe, the amount you work makes no difference to your eventual reward. From each according to his ability, to each Death.”
― Scott Alexander

“Das war nur ein rhetorischer Scherz. Sie müssen nicht lachen.”
― Jan-Uwe Fitz, Entschuldigen Sie meine Störung

“Many have stood their ground and faced the darkness when it comes for them. Fewer come for the darkness and force it to face them.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“You want to neuter us,” Director Tagg said. “Stop us from policing the criminals who run this city.”
“As my client put it, Director, we're hoping to free you to focus your efforts on real targets.”
― wildbow, Worm

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“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.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky

“When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky

“There were mysterious questions, but a mysterious answer was a contradiction in terms.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“The SpecOps dress code stated that our apparel should be 'dignified' but in Cordelia's case they had obviously stretched a point.”
― Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book

“Okay, here’s a cheat I learned in a leadership seminar. It’s called active listening. Someone says something, a complaint, or a criticism, or they’re excited about something that happened to them. For a lot of us, our instinct is to offer a solution, or expand on an idea, to fix or offer something. The key is to think about how they’re feeling, be receptive to that, and parrot it back to them. They just got a new car, and they’re happy about it? A simple ‘that’s excellent’ or ‘you must be so proud’ works. It leaves room for them to keep talking, to know you’re listening. For your teammate who just lost someone she obviously cared about, just recognizing that she’s upset and she’s right to feel upset, that’s enough.”
― wildbow, Worm

“I will take this gamble and perhaps kill those people in the process. I will kill those people who can make me smile and feel more human than I am, I will grieve their deaths, and then I will take that gamble again. Because one city, however grand, is worth that chance.”
― wildbow, Worm

“Was he the only one who was just old enough to speak out, not yet so old and jaded that he acceded to authority over anything else?

Or was it the opposite? Was he of the age where he had the ignorance of youth coupled with the arrogance of adulthood?”
― wildbow, Worm

“Limitations foster creativity. Tell an artist to paint anything, and he may struggle, but tell him to create something specific, in a set amount of time, for a certain audience, and these constraints might well push him to produce something he might never have come up with on his own. We grow and evolve by testing ourselves. That’s my personal philosophy.”
― wildbow, Worm

“But the thing about grail quests is – if you make a wrong turn two blocks away from your house, you end up at the corner store feeling mildly embarrassed. If you do almost everything right and then miss the very last turn, you end up being eaten by the legendary Black Beast of Aaargh whose ichorous stomach acid erodes your very soul into gibbering fragments.”
― Scott Alexander

“It was funny how nature reclaimed this world in its own way. It was silly to say humans were destroying the environment; we were simply changing it. Nature would persevere until the world was a barren wasteland.”
― wildbow, Worm

“And… that’s the last we have in our actual records. […] There’s been more in the last week, I take it?”
“More assault and battery,” I said, feeling a touch weary. “Whatever charges come up with the thing at the school. I sort of arranged to have a psychopath kill herself. Um. However you’d charge putting maggots in someone’s eyeballs. In self-defense.”
― wildbow, Worm

“Charm is the ability to make someone else think that both of you are pretty wonderful.”
― Kathleen Winsor

“That’s the funny thing about pity, Saint. It’s condescending by default.”
― wildbow, Worm

“I can give you my word of honor." "And pray what may be the value of that?" inquired the amused Regent. "Monsieur, it is worth its weight in gold.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

“There’s a technique we use in our local rationalist cluster called “Is That
Your True Rejection?”, and it works like this: Before you stake your
argument on a point, ask yourself in advance what you would say if that
point were decisively refuted. Would you relinquish your previous
conclusion? Would you actually change your mind? If not, maybe that point
isn’t really the key issue. You should search instead for a sufficiently
important point, or collection of points, such that you would change your
mind about the conclusion if you changed your mind about the arguments.
It is, in our patois, “logically rude,” to ask someone else to painstakingly
refute points you don’t really care about yourself.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Brain, Belief, and Politics

“A random key does not open a random lock just because they are “both random.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies

“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”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“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.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“There’s always manipulation,” Valencia replied. “When you’re in a position of power over someone else, I think it’s inescapable that your actions are tainted by that power. The best you can do is to pretend that power doesn’t exist, and to hope that they trust you enough to do the same, because then things can proceed as they normally would.”
― cthulhuraejepsen, Worth the Candle

“Do not call up that which you cannot put down.”
― H P Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
― Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Nameless City

“All systems are corrupt. All governments and all laws exist to benefit those in power.”
― D.D. Webb, The Gods are Bastards

“To whom can you appeal for justice when the source of justice itself is the source of your oppression?”
― D.D. Webb, The Gods are Bastards

“Aristocrats are like church bells: expensive, pretty, and only useful when regularly struck.”
― D.D. Webb, The Gods are Bastards

“Revenge should only be sought if it serves both a strategic and personal goal. Strategic in that it will dissuade the target or others from committing more actions that demand retaliation. Personal in that the target must understand by whom and for what they are being punished, and be unable to prevent their comeuppance, because only in that circumstance will it bring satisfaction.”
― D.D. Webb, The Gods are Bastards