Take away the ability of an intelligent, principled, hard-working mind to get it wrong, and you take away the whole thing.

If you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you. It's called a lobotomy.

If you Google 'regret and tattoo,' you will get 11.5 million hits.

We're terrified of not having the answers, and we would sometimes rather assert an incorrect answer than make our peace with the fact that we really don't know.

Take away the ability of an intelligent, principled, hard-working mind to get it wrong, and you take away the whole thing.

The inability to experience regret is one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths.

A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessments of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.