The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.

The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.

The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.

The creativity and pathology of the human mind are, after all, two sides of the same medal coined in the evolutionary mint. The first is responsible for the splendour of our cathedrals, the second for the gargoyles that decorate them to remind us that the world is full of monsters, devils, and succubi.

Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse.

Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.