The inertia of the human mind and its resistance to innovation are most clearly demonstrated not, as one might expect, read more

The inertia of the human mind and its resistance to innovation are most clearly demonstrated not, as one might expect, by the ignorant mass- which is easily swayed once its imagination is caught- but by professionals with a vested interest in tradition and in the monopoly of learning. Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse. The academic backwoodsmen have been the curse of genius from Aristarchus to Darwin and Freud; they stretch, a solid and hostile phalanx of pedantic mediocrities, across the centuries.

Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.

Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.

The genuine creator creates something that has a life of its own, something that can exist and function without him. read more

The genuine creator creates something that has a life of its own, something that can exist and function without him. This is true not only of the writer, artist and scientist, but of creators in other fields...With the noncreative it is the other way around: in whatever they do, they arrange things so that they themselves become indispensable.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

The less satisfaction we derive from being ourselves, the greater is our desire to be like others.

The less satisfaction we derive from being ourselves, the greater is our desire to be like others.

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in read more

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.

So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, read more

So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.

Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness read more

Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.