Every problem that is interesting is also soluble.

The brain is the only kind of object capable of understanding that the cosmos is even there, or why there are infinitely many prime numbers, or that apples fall because of the curvature of space-time, or that obeying its own inborn instincts can be morally wrong, or that it itself exists.

No precautions, and no precautionary principle, can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. We need a stance of problem-fixing, not just problem-avoidance.

Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.

Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow.

If we can't program it, we can't understand it.

The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy - but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.