- 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.

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.

Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.

I don't want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organised.

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

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?

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.