My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism

A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.

Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea.

You need a story to displace a story.

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.

I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.

It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.