Rationality quotes: August 2010

Cyan

This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Is the source online? The first page of Google results seems to be just people quoting the line.

I tracked down the source as rec.arts.sf.fandom, 09 Aug 2000 (previous to any use as a quote), in a thread titled, "Do cats go to heaven?"

It's (sort of) available online in the Google Groups archive.

However, the provided link does not seem to work due to the huge length of the thread (it's trying to create a tree threaded discussion out of 4189 posts), but I was able to see several references to it inside, including the beginning as a snippet.