In strategic decisions, I'd be really concerned about overconfidence.

The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.

We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

Many ideas happen to us. We have intuition, we have feeling, we have emotion, all of that happens, we don't decide to do it. We don't control it.

By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.

The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.

Buddhism has a term for the happiness we feel at someone else’s success or good fortune. Sympathetic joy, as it is known, invites us to celebrate for others.

The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.

What is most needed in Darfur is an international peacekeeping and protection presence, and this is what the Sudanese government most wants to avoid.

Your spouse should be just attractive enough to turn you on. Anything more is trouble.

Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.

If a country doesn't recognize minority rights and human rights, including women's rights, you will not have the kind of stability and prosperity that is possible.

When I die, I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in Dublin. I wonder would they know it was me?

Fame is but the breath of people, and that often unwholesome.

As he poured carefully, Arrow's head turned toward the sound. The horse made a low grumbling noise in his throat. "Hold your horses," he said. The he laughed. It seemed absurd to say tat to a horse.

Child welfare ought really to cover all sorts of topics, such as better water and sanitation and good roads, and clean streets and public parks and playgrounds.