Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is the definitive Harry Potter story not written by JK Rowling. HPMOR is written by Eliezer Yudkowsky, a man that, despite not completing high school and having no other formal education, has spent the better part of his life so far researching and writing on Human Rationality and Artificial Intelligence. HPMOR is already 1391 pages long, with 85 chapters published. The story so far is nowhere close to being complete. While I spent a solid 24 hours catching up to the current story arc, I suggest reading it a few chapters at a time. Enjoy the well crafted story and think about the messages the author is attempting to deliver using the story as his platform.

Below are some of my favorite quotes from the story so far (minor spoilers):

“Tell me, Harry,” said the old wizard, “will you become a monster?” “No,” said the boy, an iron certainty in his voice.
“Why not?” said the old wizard.
The young boy stood very straight, his chin raised high and proud,
and said: “There is no justice in the laws of Nature, Headmaster, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don’t care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don’t have to! We care! There is light in the world, and it is us!”

...

The Earth, blazing blue and white with reflected sunlight as it hung in space, amid the black void and the brilliant points of light. It belonged there, within that image, because it was what gave everything else its meaning. The Earth was what made the stars significant, made them more than uncontrolled fusion reactions, because it was Earth that would someday colonize the galaxy, and fulfill the promise of the night sky.
Would they still be plagued by Dementors, the children’s children’s children, the distant descendants of humankind as they strode from star to star? No. Of course not. The Dementors were only little nuisances, paling into nothingness in the light of that promise; not unkillable, not invincible, not even close.

...

So with all that strangeness, how do you recognize a person? Not by the shape, not by how many arms or legs it has. Not by the sort of substance it’s made out of, whether that’s flesh or crystal or stuff I can’t imagine. You would have to recognize them as people from their minds.

...

Compared to what might be out there, every human being who ever lived, we’re all like brothers and sisters, you could hardly even tell us apart. The ones out there who met us, they wouldn’t see British or French, they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, they’d just see a human being. Humans who can love, and hate, and laugh, and cry; and to them, the ones out there, that would make us all as alike as peas in the same pod. They would be different, though. Really different. But that wouldn’t stop us, and it wouldn’t stop them, if we both wanted to be friends together.

...

If you always keep seeking the truth,” Harry said, “and if you don’t refuse the warm thoughts when you find them, then I’m sure you will. I think a person could get anywhere if they just kept going long enough, even to the stars.

...

They’d tried exactly that during the French Revolution, more or less—make a list of all the enemies of Progress and remove everything above the neck—and it hadn’t worked out too well from what Harry recalled. Maybe he needed to dust off some of those history books his father had bought him, and see if what had gone wrong with the French Revolution was something easy to fix.

...

Harry gave an evil laugh, it just seemed to come naturally at that point. “You have to realize, Draco, that the whole world you know, all of magical Britain, is just one square on a much larger gameboard. The gameboard that includes places like the Moon, and the stars in the night sky, which are lights just like the Sun only unimaginably far away, and things like galaxies that are vastly huger than the Earth and Sun, things so large that only scientists can see them and you don’t even know they exist.

...

“It’s a Time-Turner. Each spin of the hourglass sends you one hour back in time. So if you use it to go back two hours every day, you should always be able to get to sleep at the same time.”
Harry’s suspension of disbelief blew completely out the window.
You’re giving me a time machine to treat my sleep disorder.
You’re giving me a time machine to treat my sleep disorder.
You’re GIVING ME A TIME MACHINE in order to TREAT MY SLEEP DISORDER.
“Ehehehehhheheh...” Harry’s mouth said. He was now holding the necklace away from him as though it were a live bomb. Well, no, not as if it were a live bomb, that didn’t begin to describe the severity of the situation. Harry held the necklace away from him as though it were a time machine.

...

Say, Professor McGonagall, did you know that time-reversed ordinary matter looks just like antimatter? Why yes it does! Did you know that one kilogram of antimatter encountering one kilogram of matter will annihilate in an explosion equivalent to 43 million tons of tnt? Do you realize that I myself weigh 41 kilograms and that the resulting blast would leave a giant smoking crater where there used to be Scotland?