[Y]ou could spend hundreds of hours doing a detailed comparison of the total number of funds offered, frequency of mailings, and alternative-investment accounts available, but more is lost from indecision than bad decisions.
Ramit Sethi, I Will Teach You to Be Rich: No Guilt, No Excuses, Just a 6-week Program that Works, New York, 2009, p. 87
Religion, we think, has a great deal to offer to many people—the comfort of faith and the security of community among them. But believing that God doesn’t like sex, as many religions seem to, is like believing that God doesn’t like you. Because of this belief, a tremendous number of people carry great shame for their own perfectly natural sexual desires and activities.
We prefer the beliefs of a woman we met, a devoted churchgoer in a fundamentalist faith. She told us that when she was about five years old, she discovered the joys of masturbation in the back seat of the family car, tucked under a warm blanket on a long trip. It felt so wonderful that she concluded that the existence of her clitoris was proof positive that God loved her.
Dossie Easton & Janet Hardy, The Ethical Slut, 2nd ed., New York, 2009, p. 13
Intensive care succeeds only when we hold the odds of doing harm low enough for the odds of doing good to prevail. This is hard.
Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, New York, 2009, p. 24
[E]ven if average future periods were only about equally as good as the current period, the whole of the future would be about a trillion times more important, in itself, than everything that has happened in the last 100 years.
Nick Beckstead, On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future, doctoral dissertation, University of Rutgers, New Brunswick, 2013, p. 67