Robert M. Pirsig

There's something advantageous about having people underestimate your intellect, insomuch as a lot of things are revealed to you. They assume you don't know what you're talking about, then all of a sudden, you do. And the next thing you know, you have information you wouldn't normally have.

The Times has much less power than you think. I believe we attribute power to the media generally that it simply doesn't have. It's very convenient to blame the media, the same way we blame television for everything that's going wrong in society.

Creating a body of mathematics is about intellectual labor, not some kind of transcendental revelation. There are plenty of important components of European fractal geometry that are missing from the African version.