“Don't be like anybody else. Be different. Then you can make a contribution. Otherwise, you just echo something; you're just a reflection.”

“Nobody loves the rat race, but nobody can think of anything else—Satan has us just where he wants us.”

“Doctors and trainers often see perfectly developed bodies, but nobody can even begin to imagine what a perfect *mind* would be like; that is where the whole range of progress and growth must take place.”

“The very helplessness of the public which makes it necessary for them to consult the experts also makes it impossible for them to judge how expert they are.”

“Things that appear unlikely, impossible, or paradoxical from one point of view often make perfectly good sense from another.”

“Blindness to larger contexts is a constitutional defect of human thinking imposed by the painful necessity of being able to concentrate on only one thing at a time. We forget as we virtuously concentrate on that one thing that hundreds of other things are going on at the same time and on every side of us, things that are just as important as the object of our study and that are all interconnected in ways that we cannot even guess. Sad to say, our picture of the world to the degree to which it has that neatness, precision, and finality so coveted by scholarship is a false one.I once studied with a famous professor who declared that he deliberately avoided the study of any literature east of Greece lest the new vision destroy the architectonic perfection of his own celebrated construction of the Greek mind. His picture of that mind was immensely impressive but, I strongly suspect, completely misleading.”

“All scholarship, like all science, is an ongoing, open-ended discussion in which all conclusions are tentative forever, the principal value and charm of the game being the discovery of the totally unexpected.”