I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.

Culture is public, because meaning is

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things

There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world

A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying a fear.