Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing.

When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that "wonderful kind of engine...a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal," they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, "he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life." To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We're all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?

The Internet is like a town that leaves its streets unmarked on the principle that people who don't already know don't belong

Neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had.

I have seen the future, and it is still in the future.