“At a certain age children are greatly intrigued by the possibility of locating themselves on a map. It appears strange that one's familiar life should actually have all occurred in an area delineated by a set of quite impersonal (and hitherto unfamiliar) coordinates on the surface of the map. The child's exclamations of "I was there" and "I am here right now" betray the astonishment that the place of last summer's vacation, a place marked in memory by such sharply personal events as the ownership of one's first dog or the secret assembling of a collection of worms, should have specific latitudes and longitudes devised by strangers to one's dog, one's worms, and oneself. This locating of oneself in configurations conceived by strangers is one of the important aspects of what, perhaps euphemistically, is called "growing up". One participates in the real world of grown-ups by having an address. The child who only recently might have mailed a letter addressed "To my Granddaddy" now informs a fellow worm-collector of his exact address – street, town, state and all – and finds his tentative allegiance to the grown-up world view dramatically legitimated by the arrival of the letter.”

A comment on Wrong Questions http://lesswrong.com/lw/og/wrong_questions/ (March 2008)
Context: Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so, if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality.

Discussing the w:Emin Pasha Relief Expedition with Eugen Wolf on 5 December 1888
:„Ihre Karte von Afrika ist ja sehr schön, aber meine Karte von Afrika liegt in Europa. Hier liegt Rußland, und hier" - nach links deutend - "liegt Frankreich, und wir sind in der Mitte; das ist meine Karte von Afrika."
::Eugen Wolf: Vom Fürsten Bismarck und seinem Haus. Tagebuchblätter. 2nd edition Berlin 1904, p. 16 archive.org http://archive.org/stream/vomfrstenbismar00wolfgoog#page/n34/mode/2up
1880s

Not My Father's Son: A Family Memoir (2014)

Mitch All Together (2003)

Source: Moby-Dick or, The Whale

Source: The Nature and Authority of Scripture (1995), p. 23
Context: Vivekananda followed his teacher, Ramakrishna, in attributing a low value to scriptures and in upholding the supremacy of personal experience. The adequacy of scriptures is compared to the utility of a map to a traveller, before visiting a country. The map, according to Vivekananda, can create only curiosity for first-hand knowledge of the place and can communicate only a vague conception of its reality. Maps are in no way equivalent to the direct knowledge of the country, gathered by actually being there.

2007 Miss Teen USA Pageant, 24 August 2007^{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww}
The Yale Book of Quotations designated the response the second most memorable quote of 2007^{http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/12/19/us-quotes-odd-idUSN1959512020071219}
Upton won the 2007 World Stupidity Award for the Stupidest Statement of the Year^{https://web.archive.org/web/20090106013000/http://www.stupidityawards.com/Stupidest_Statement_of_the_Year.html}