Top 150 Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “If you want to build a recursively self-improving AI, have it go through a billion sequential self-modifications, become vastly smarter than you, and not die, you’ve got to work to a pretty precise standard.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

52. “Singularitarians are the munchkins of the real world. We just ignore all the usual dungeons and head straight for the cycle of infinite wish spells.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

53. “We underestimate the distance between ourselves and others. Not just inferential distance, but distances of temperament and ability, distances of situation and resource, distances of unspoken knowledge and unnoticed skills and luck, distances of interior landscape.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

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

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

55. “You cannot rationalize what is not rational to begin with – as if lying were called truthization. There is no way to obtain more truth for a proposition by bribery, flattery, or the most passionate argument – you can make more people believe the proposition, but you cannot make it more true.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

56. “It is triple ultra forbidden to respond to criticism with violence. There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

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

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

58. “I am tempted to say that a doctorate in AI would be negatively useful, but I am not one to hold someone’s reckless youth against them – just because you acquired a doctorate in AI doesn’t mean you should be permanently disqualified.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

59. “Since the rise of Homo sapiens, human beings have been the smartest minds around. But very shortly – on a historical scale, that is – we can expect technology to break the upper bound on intelligence that has held for the last few tens of thousands of years.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

60. “The strength of a theory is not what it allows, but what it prohibits; if you can invent an equally persuasive explanation for any outcome, you have zero knowledge.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

61. “The people I know who seem to make unusual efforts at rationality, are unusually honest, or, failing that, at least have unusually bad social skills.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

62. “If science is a religion, it is the religion that heals the sick and reveals the secrets of the stars.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

63. “When you think of intelligence, don’t think of a college professor; think of human beings as opposed to chimpanzees. If you don’t have human intelligence, you’re not even in the game.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

64. “This is one of theprimary mechanisms whereby, if a fool says the sun is shining, we do notcorrectly discard this as irrelevant nonevidence, but rather find ourselvesimpelled to say that it must be dark outside.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

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

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

66. “By and large, the answer to the question “How do large institutions survive?” is “They don’t!” The vast majority of large modern-day institutions some of them extremely vital to the functioning of our complex civilization simply fail to exist in the first place.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

67. “That is not how it works in Ravenclaw, Draco! If you have to push someone into a wall it means your brain is too weak to beat them the right way and everyone in Ravenclaw knows that -.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

68. “Usually, when things suck, it’s because they suck in a way that’s a Nash equilibrium.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

69. “Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement. Every rationalist doubts, but not all doubts are rational. Wearing doubts doesn’t make you a rationalist any more than wearing a white medical lab coat makes you a doctor.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

70. “Oops is the sound we make when we improve our beliefs and strategies; so to look back at a time and not see anything you did wrong means that you haven’t learned anything or changed your mind since then.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

71. “Evil done in the name of good. Evil done in the name of evil. Which is worse?”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

72. “Once you tell a lie, the truth is your enemy; and every truth connected to that truth, and every ally of truth in general; all of these you must oppose, to protect the lie. Whether you’re lying to others, or to yourself.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

73. “Only a man exceedingly proud and vain,” Dumbledore said quietly, as he turned back to the Floo roaring up again with green flames, “would believe that his heir should be like himself, rather than like who he wished that he could be.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

74. “Above all, don’t ask what to believe – ask what to anticipate. Every question of belief should flow from a question of anticipation, and that question of anticipation should be the center of the inquiry.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

75. “A friend isn’t someone you use once and then throw away, a friend is someone you use over and over again.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

76. “No rescuer hath the rescuer, Godric Gryffindor had written. No Lord hath the champion, no mother and no father, only nothingness above.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

77. “Paolo Freire said, “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

78. “If the box contains a diamond, I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond; If the box does not contain a diamond, I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond; Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

79. “If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

80. “Nestled up against the wall, where Professor Quirrell had stumbled, glistened the crushed remains of a beautiful blue beetle.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

81. “To figure out a strange plot, look at what happens, then ask who benefits.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

82. “Harry had read once, somewhere, that the opposite of happiness wasn’t sadness, but boredom; and the author had gone on to say that to find happiness in life you asked yourself not what would make you happy, but what would excite you. And by the same reasoning, hatred wasn’t the true opposite of love. Even hatred was a kind of respect that you could give to someone’s existence. If you cared about someone enough to prefer their dying to their living, it meant you were thinking about them.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

83. “To be humble is to take specific actions in anticipation of your own errors. To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

84. “Twenty years later, that was what he would desperately wish had happened twenty years ago, and twenty years before twenty years later happened to be right now. Altering the distant past was easy, you just had to think of it at the right time.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

85. “A playground is a great place to be a bully, and a terrible place to be a victim, if the teachers don’t care who started it.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

86. “What happened to me personally is only anecdotal evidence,” Harry explained. “It doesn’t carry the same weight as a replicated, peer-reviewed journal article about a controlled study with random assignment, many subjects, large effect sizes and strong statistical significance.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

87. “A random key does not open a random lock just because they are “both random.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

88. “Homo sapiens didn’t become the dominant species on this planet by having the sharpest claws or hardest armor – though I suppose some of that point may be lost on wizards. Still, it’s beneath my dignity as a human being to be scared of anything that isn’t smarter than I am.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

89. “Why do you believe what you believe? What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

90. “Don’t let your life be steered by your reluctance to do a little extra thinking.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

91. “Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back – providing aid and comfort to the enemy. Politics is the Mind-Killer.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

92. “When people think of “emotion” and “rationality” as opposed, I suspect that they are really thinking of System 1 and System 2 – fast perceptual judgments versus slow deliberative judgments. Deliberative judgments aren’t always true, and perceptual judgments aren’t always false; so it is very important to distinguish that dichotomy from “rationality.” Both systems can serve the goal of truth, or defeat it, depending on how they are used.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

93. “It’s okay to bribe people with books, right?”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

94. “But what happens after you break – that, too, is part of being a hero.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

95. “Well, sounding wise wasn’t difficult. It was a lot easier than being intelligent, actually, since you didn’t have to say anything surprising or come up with any new insights. You just let your brain’s pattern-matching software complete the cliche, using whatever Deep Wisdom you’d stored previously.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

96. “There are forty kinds of lunacy but only one kind of common sense.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

97. “She was taken to St. Mungo’s, where,” the Headmistress now sounded slightly perturbed, “a standard diagnostic Charm showed Miss Granger as a healthy unicorn in excellent physical condition except that her mane needs combing.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

98. “You do realize that your brain is literally hardwired to generate error signals when it sees other human-shaped objects stating a different opinion from yourself.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

99. “What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it. – Eugene Gendlin.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

100. “And I suspect, Mr. Potter, that if I leave you alone for two months with your schoolbooks, even without a wand, I will return to this house only to find a crater billowing purple smoke, a depopulated city surrounding it and a plague of flaming zebras terrorising what remains of England.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky