Top 150 Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “If there is no black and white, there is yet lighter and darker, and not all grays are the same.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

102. “Never give anyone wise advice unless you know exactly what you’re both talking about.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

103. “Most ill-doers do not think of themselves as evil; indeed, most conceive themselves the heroes of the stories they tell. I once thought that the greatest evil in this world was done in the name of the greater good. I was wrong. Terribly wrong. There is evil in this world which knows itself for evil, and hates the good with all its strength. All fair things does it desire to destroy.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

104. “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

105. “You can never have enough books. But you certainly tried. It was a really, really, really good try.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

106. “Do not think that heroes cannot be broken! We are only more difficult to break, Hermione.” The old wizard’s eyes had grown sterner than she had ever seen. “When you have been exhausted for many hours, when pain and death is not a passing fear but a certainty, then it is harder to be a hero.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

107. “People who have time to plan are scary.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

108. “People cling to their intuitions, I think, not so much because they believe their cognitive algorithms are perfectly reliable, but because they can’t see their intuitions as the way their cognitive algorithms happen to look from the inside. And so everything you try to say about how the native cognitive algorithm goes astray, ends up being contrasted to their direct perception of the Way Things Really Are – and discarded as obviously wrong.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

109. “Asimov’s “The Relativity of Wrong”:3 When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

110. “When you find yourself in philosophical difficulties, the first line of defense is not to define your problematic terms, but to see whether you can think without using those terms at all. Or any of their short synonyms. And be careful not to let yourself invent a new word to use instead. Describe outward observables and interior mechanisms; don’t use a single handle, whatever that handle may be.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

111. “It wasn’t cheating, but it was Science, which was almost as good.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

112. “For it is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

113. “Only God can tell a truly plausible lie.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

114. “If you see your activities and situation originally, you will be able to originally see your goals as well. If you can look with fresh eyes, as though for the first time, you will see yourself doing things that you would never dream of doing if they were not habits.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

115. “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

116. “Listen to hypotheses as they plead their cases before you, but remember that you are not a hypothesis, you are the judge. Therefore do not seek to argue for one side or another, for if you knew your destination, you would already be there.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

117. “Life is mundane, and does not need a weird explanation.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

118. “You see, Miss Granger, people do not grow up because of time, people grow up when they are placed in grownup situations.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

119. “They crossed the boundary from Christmas Eve to Christmas Day within that timeless void where Earthly rotations meant nothing, the one true everlasting Silent Night.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

120. “Are you familiar with the economic concept of ‘replacement value’? Hermione’s replacement value is infinite! There’s nowhere else I can go to buy another one!”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

121. “Many philosophers – particularly amateur philosophers, and ancient philosophers – share a dangerous instinct: If you give them a question, they try to answer it.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

122. “I’ve seen people severely messed up by their own knowledge of biases. They have more ammunition with which to argue against anything they don’t like. And that problem – too much ready ammunition – is one of the primary ways that people with high mental agility end up stupid, in Stanovich’s “dysrationalia” sense of stupidity.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

123. “The truly important problems are often the ones you’re not even considering, because they appear to be impossible, or, um, actually difficult, or worst of all, not clear how to solve.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

124. “If the joy of scientific discovery is one-shot per discovery, then, from a fun-theoretic perspective, Newton probably used up a substantial increment of the total Physics Fun available over the entire history of Earth-originating intelligent life. That selfish bastard explained the orbits of planets and the tides.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

125. “Awww, it sounds like someone fell prey to the planning fallacy.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

126. “Evil happens, thought Harry, it doesn’t mean anything or teach us anything, except to not be evil.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

127. “And I know that I’d just make myself unhappy by comparing that reality to... something perfect that I built up in my imagination.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

128. “If what you believe doesn’t depend om what you see, you’ve been blinded as effectively as by poking out your eyeballs.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

129. “Hey, Draco, you know what I bet is even better for becoming friends than exchanging secrets? Committing murder.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

130. “Why would you pay attention to your own thoughts, if you knew you were trying to manipulate yourself.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

131. “As you would be kind to others, be kinder to yourself as well.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

132. “The golden coins might have been his, but they were still stolen – self-stolen? Auto-thieved?”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

133. “Reality is always lawful,” said Harry, “even if we don’t know the law.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

134. “It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you,” Harry recited the proverb.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

135. “A Gryffindor would say that people don’t become who they should be, because they’re afraid.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

136. “You cannot obtain more truth for a fixed proposition by arguing it. To improve our beliefs, we must necessarily change our beliefs.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

137. “The point of thinking is to shape our plans; if you’re going to keep the same plans anyway, why bother going to all that work to justify it? When.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

138. “John Kenneth Galbraith said: “Faced with the choice of changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

139. “It’s amazing how many Noble Liars and their ilk are eager to embrace ethical violations – with all due bewailing of their agonies of conscience – when they haven’t spent even five minutes by the clock looking for an alternative.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

140. “When you think about nonviolence, you think of Gandhi – not an anonymous protestor in one of Gandhi’s marches who faced down riot clubs and guns, and got beaten, and had to be taken to the hospital, and walked with a limp for the rest of her life, and no one ever remembered her name.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

141. “Be careful... any time you find yourself defining the “winner” as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

142. “You’d think there’d be some kind of more dramatic mental event associated with updating on an observation of infinitesimal probability -” Harry stopped himself. Mum, the witch, and even his Dad were giving him that look again. “I mean, with finding out that everything I believe is false.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

143. “Harry had run into trouble falling asleep Friday night, which he had anticipated might happen, and so he had decided to take the obvious advance precaution of buying a sleeping potion; and to prevent it from constituting a visible sign that he was nervous, he had decided to buy it off Fred and George a couple of months earlier.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

144. “The most dangerous truth a Confessor knows is that the rules of society are just consensual hallucinations. Choosing to wake up from the dream means choosing to end your life.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

145. “Nonviolent ideals were cheap to hold if you were a scientist, living inside the Protego bubble cast by the police officers and soldiers whose actions you had the luxury to question.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

146. “People form close friendships by knowing private things about each other, and the reason most people don’t make close friends is because they’re too embarrassed to share anything really important about themselves.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

147. “Sometimes Harry thought the deepest split in his personality wasn’t anything to do with his dark side; rather it was the divide between the altruistic and forgiving Abstract Reasoning Harry, versus the frustrated and angry Harry In The Moment.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

148. “I am not sure how to explain it, except that – truth matters to us.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

149. “There is never an idea so true that it’s wrong to criticize any argument that supports it.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

150. “What I am trying to say is that more than your own life has to be at stake, before a person becomes desperate enough to resort to math.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky