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

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.

I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false

As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others' agony something bearable, supportable- something as we say, sufferable.

I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical

I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style