One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress, that things are getting better. There is a sense of volatility, but not of progress.

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.

Trouble is a sieve through which we sift our acquaintances. Those too big to pass through are our friends.

The last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances to choose one's own way.

Ultimately, education in its real sense is the pursuit of truth. It is an endless journey through knowledge and enlightenment.

Few take advice, or physic, without wry faces at it.

If I got paid, it was no more than five dollars a column, and I still think I was overpaid.

Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.

So when my critics say that Sassy is only for alienated teenagers, I feel like responding, 'Well, isn't an unalienated teenager the biggest oxymoron?'

If you never take a risk, you will never know what changes you need to make.

I'm trying to be slightly happier with myself. No one really wants to be miserable all the time.

The coat of the buffalo never pinches under the arm, never puckers at the shoulders; it is always the same, yet never old fashioned nor out of date.