“His appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be, and yet he doesn't look like a man without a profession either. Consider what he's like: He always knows what to do. He knows how to gaze into a woman's eyes. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He can box. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tenacious, dashing, circumspect — why quibble, suppose we grant him all those qualities — yet he has none of them! They have made him what he is, they have set his course for him, and yet they don't belong to him. When he is angry, something in him laughs. When he is sad, he is up to something. When something moves him, he turns against it. He'll always see a good side to every bad action. What he thinks of anything will always depend on some possible context — nothing is, to him, what it is: everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a super-whole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only 'how' it is — some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that's what interests him.”

It's all there, it's a true story.
When asked about the meaning of the song "Ballad of a Thin Man" during a 1965 interview.

The Necessity of Atheism (1811)

Source: The Income Tax: Root of All Evil (1954), p. 12

Samuel Johnson
About

Speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention (July 19, 2016)

Source: Light in August (1932), Chapter 2

“Poets, Critics, and Readers”, p. 109
No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)

http://www.arsenal.com/news/news-archive/henry-i-was-scared-of-incredible-scholes
Thierry Henry