Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.

Part of the rationalist ethos is binding yourself emotionally to an absolutely lawful reductionistic universe - a universe containing no ontologically basic mental things such as souls or magic and pouring all your hope and all your care into that merely real universe and its possibilities, without disappointment.

The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.

Rationality is the master lifehack which distinguishes which other lifehacks to use.

To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.

Through rationality we shall become awesome, and invent and test systematic methods for making people awesome, and plot to optimize everything in sight, and the more fun we have the more people will want to join us.

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?