Oz > Oz's Quotes

“There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky.

But they don't have to! WE care! There IS light in the world, and it is US!”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“I only want power so I can get books.”
― 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

“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

“Trying and getting hurt can't possibly be worse for you than being... stuck.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“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

“Like that's the only reason anyone would ever buy a first-aid kit? Don't take this the wrong way, Professor McGonagall, but what sort of crazy children are you used to dealing with?"

"Gryffindors," spat Professor McGonagall, the word carrying a freight of bitterness and despair that fell like an eternal curse on all youthful heroism and high spirits.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Why does any kind of cynicism appeal to people? Because it seems like a mark of maturity, of sophistication, like you’ve seen everything and know better. Or because putting something down feels like pushing yourself up.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Boys," said Hermione Granger, "should not be allowed to love girls without asking them first! This is true in a number of ways and especially when it comes to gluing people to the ceiling!”
― 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

“I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution.”
― 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

“I'm lazy! I hate work! Hate hard work in all its forms! Clever shortcuts, that's all I'm about!”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“You couldn't changed history. But you could get it right to start with. Do something differently the FIRST time around.
This whole business with seeking Slytherin's secrets... seemed an awful lot like the sort of thing where, years later, you would look back and say, 'And THAT was where it all started to go wrong.'
And he would wish desperately for the ability to fall back through time and make a different choice.
Wish granted. Now what?”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

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

“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

“Okay, so either (a) I just teleported somewhere else entirely (b) they can fold space like no one's business or (c) they are simply ignoring all the rules.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“...there's something in science like the shine of the Patronus Charm, driving back all sorts of darkness and madness...”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Aside from helping people with their homework, or anything else they needed, she really didn't know how to meet people. She didn't feel like she was a shy person. She thought of herself as a take-charge sort of girl. And yet, somehow, if there wasn't some request along the lines of "I can't remember how to do long division" then it was just too awkward to go up to someone and say... what? She'd never been able to figure out what. And there didn't seem to be a standard information sheet, which was ridiculous. The whole business of meeting people had never seemed sensible to her. Why did she have to take all the responsibility herself when there were two people involved? Why didn't adults ever help? She wished some other girl would just walk up to her and say, "Hermione, the teacher told me to be friends with you".”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“In what weird alternative universe would that girl NOT be Sorted into Ravenclaw? If Hermione Granger didn't go to Ravenclaw then there was no good reason for Ravenclaw House to exist.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“...if you're unhappy whenever other people don't picture you exactly the same way you picture yourself, that's already dooming yourself to always be unhappy. No one ever thinks of us just the same way we think of ourselves.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“The glass display cases had shown rock-throwers crafted by the Australian aborigines - like giant wooden shoehorns, they'd looked, but smoothed and carved and ornamented with the most painstaking care. In the 40,000 years since anatomically modern humans had migrated to Australia from Asia, nobody had invented the bow-and-arrow. It really made you appreciate how non-obvious was the idea of Progress. Why would you even think of Invention as something important, if all your history's heroic tales were of great warriors and defenders instead of Thomas Edison? How could anyone possibly have suspected, while carving a rock-thrower with painstaking care, that someday human beings would invent rocket ships and nuclear energy?”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“And then Harry Potter had launched in to a speech that was inspiring, yet vague. A speech to the effect that Fred and George and Lee had tremendous potential if they could just learn to be weirder. To make people's live surreal, instead of just surprising them with the equivalents of buckets of water propped above doors. (Fred and George had exchanged interested looks, they'd never thought of that one.) Harry Potter had invoked a picture of the prank they'd pulled on Neville - which, Harry had mentioned with some remorse, the Sorting Hat had chewed him out on - but which must have made Neville doubt his own sanity. For Neville it would have felt like being suddendly transported into an alternate universe. The same way everyone else had felt when they'd seen Snape apologize. That was the true power of pranking.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“But it is cute. It's such a boy thing to do.

Drop dead.

Aw, you say the most romantic things.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“He really really really shouldn't have done that. Amazing how much more obvious that became one second after it was too late.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Mr. Malfoy is new to the business of having ideas, and so when he has one, he becomes proud of himself for having it. He has not yet had enough ideas to unflinchingly discard those that are beautiful in some aspects and impractical in others; he has not yet acquired confidence in his own ability to think of better ideas as he requires them. What we are seeing here is not Mr. Malfoy's best idea, I fear, but rather his only idea.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Without thinking about it at all, Harry stepped in front of Hermione.

There was an intake of breath from behind him, and then a moment later Hermione brushed past and stepped in front of him. "Run, Harry!" she said. "Boys shouldn't have to be in danger.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Then you get the wrong answer and you can't go to the Moon that way! Nature isn't a person, you can't trick them into believing something else, if you try to tell the Moon it's made of cheese you can argue for days and it won't change the Moon! What you're talking about is rationalization, like starting with a sheet of paper, moving straight down to the bottom line, using ink to write 'and therefore, the Moon is made of cheese', and then moving back up to write all sorts of clever arguments above. But either the Moon is made of cheese or it isn't. The moment you wrote the bottom line, it was already true or already false. Whether or not the whole sheet of paper ends up with the right conclusion or the wrong conclusion is fixed the instant you write down the bottom line.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“For an instant Harry imagined... Just for an instant, before his imagination blew a fuse and called an emergency shut down and told him never to imagine that again.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“For an instant Harry imagined his own Mum and Dad in Azkaban with the Dementors sucking out their life, draining away the happy memories of their love for him. Just for an instant, before his imagination blew a fuse and called an emergency shutdown and told him never to imagine that again.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality