Ben Pace > Ben's Quotes

“Everyone should be able to do one card trick, tell two jokes, and recite three poems, in case they are ever trapped in an elevator.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“Some people care too much. I think it's called love.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“It is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason.”
― Mary Shelley

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Lying in bed would be an altogether supreme experience if one only had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

“In quiet places, reason abounds.”
― Adlai E. Stevenson

“Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing”
― Camille Pissarro

“The wonder is, not that the field of stars is so vast, but that man has measured it.”
― Anatole France

“Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?”
― Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

“Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.”
― Sam Harris, Lying

“Let me assure you that my intent is not to offend or merely be provocative. I'm simply worried.”
― Sam Harris

“The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation.”
― Sam Harris

“Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love”
― Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

“It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for.”
― Sam Harris

“We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.”
― Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values

“A comedian is someone who tells the truth. Truth is the set of all jokes told by all comedians in the world.”
― Piero Scaruffi

“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

“I don't want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organised.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“It's a most peculiar psychology—this business of 'Science is based on faith too, so there!' Typically this is said by people who claim that faith is a good thing. Then why do they say 'Science is based on faith too!' in that angry-triumphal tone, rather than as a compliment? And a rather dangerous compliment to give, one would think, from their perspective. If science is based on 'faith', then science is of the same kind as religion—directly comparable. If science is a religion, it is the religion that heals the sick and reveals the secrets of the stars. It would make sense to say, 'The priests of science can blatantly, publicly, verifiably walk on the Moon as a faith-based miracle, and your priests' faith can't do the same.' Are you sure you wish to go there, oh faithist? Perhaps, on further reflection, you would prefer to retract this whole business of 'Science is a religion too!”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Less Wrong Sequences

“The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky

“To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky

“Doing worse with more knowledge means you are doing something very wrong.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky

“Lies propagate, that's what I'm saying. You've got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that's connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you'd even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn't work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn't work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they've got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn't exist and there's no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn't just mistaken, it's anti-epistemology, it's systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there's someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there's a lot of people out there telling lies.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Most Muggles lived in a world defined by the limits of what you could do with cars and telephones. Even though Muggle physics explicitly permitted possibilities like molecular nanotechnology or the Penrose process for extracting energy from black holes, most people filed that away in the same section of their brain that stored fairy tales and history books, well away from their personal realities: Long ago and far away, ever so long ago.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

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

“Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality