What I learned on my own I still remember

The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination

It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.

... it is hard to disentangle ethics on one hand, from knowledge and competence on the other ...

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing

Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators

The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions

I attended a symposium, an event named after a fifth century (B.C.) Athenian drinking party in which nonnerds talked about love; alas, there was no drinking, and mercifully, nobody talked about love.

Academic work, because of its attention-seeking orientation, can be easily subjected to Lindy effects: think of the hundreds of thousands of papers that are just noise, in spite of how hyped they were at the time of publication.