Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Not every change is an improvement but every improvement is a change; you can't do anything BETTER unless you can manage to do it DIFFERENTLY, you've got to let yourself do better than other people!”
― 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

“Trying and getting hurt can't possibly be worse for you than being... stuck.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“There is light in the world, and it is us!”
― 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

“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

“I ask the fundamental question of rationality: Why do you believe what you believe? What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“I CAN DO MAGIC! FEAR ME, LAWS OF PHYSICS, I'M COMING TO VIOLATE 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

“I have no great fondness for the universe, but I do live there”
― 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

“...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

“When you walk past a bookshop you haven't visited before, you have to go in and look around. That's the family rule.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“What is deadlier than hate, and flows without limit?

Indifference.”
― 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

“Sometimes, when this flawed world seems unusually hateful, I wonder whether there might be some other place, far away, where I should have been. I cannot seem to imagine what that place might be, and if I can't even imagine it then how can I believe it exists? And yet the universe is so very, very wide, and perhaps it might exist anyway? But the stars are so very, very far away. It would take a long, long time to get there, even if I knew the way. And I wonder what I would dream about, if I slept for a long, long time...”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Something, somewhere, somewhen, must have happened differently...

PETUNIA EVANS married Michael Verres, a Professor of Biochemistry at Oxford.

HARRY JAMES POTTER-EVANS-VERRES grew up in a house filled to the brim with books. He once bit a math teacher who didn't know what a logarithm was. He's read Godel, Escher, Bach and Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases and volume one of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. And despite what everyone who's met him seems to fear, he doesn't want to become the next Dark Lord. He was raised better than that. He wants to discover the laws of magic and become a god.

HERMIONE GRANGER is doing better than him in every class except broomstick riding.

DRACO MALFOY is exactly what you would expect an eleven-year-old boy to be like if Darth Vader were his doting father.

PROFESSOR QUIRRELL is living his lifelong dream of teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts, or as he prefers to call his class, Battle Magic. His students are all wondering what's going to go wrong with the Defense Professor this time.

DUMBLEDORE is either insane, or playing some vastly deeper game which involved setting fire to a chicken.

DEPUTY HEADMISTRESS MINERVA MCGONAGALL needs to go off somewhere private and scream for a while.

Presenting:

HARRY POTTER AND THE METHODS OF RATIONALITY

You ain't guessin' where this one's going.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“I'm not a psychopath, I'm just very creative.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality