“Bob Wilson admitted to himself that a Ph. D. and an appointment as an instructor was not his idea of existence. Still, it beat working for a living.”

“No man, I suppose, ever admits to himself candidly that he gets his living in a dishonourable way.”

“…why should our self-appointed instructors assume that because we do not chatter about a thing, we have never heard of it?”

“Myrnin was silent for a beat, and then he said, "Bob would be very disappointed in you.”

“Well, I hate to admit it, but it is possible that there is (one) such a thing as telepathy and (two) that the CETI project's idea that we might communicate with extraterrestrial beings via telepathy is possibly a reasonable idea--if telepathy exists and if ETIs exist. Otherwise we are trying to communicate with someone who doesn't exist with a system which doesn't work.”

“[ Computing ] is just a fabulous place for that, because it's a place where you don't have to be a Ph. D. or anything else. It's a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.”

“It is to be feared that Spinoza would not have been enlightened enough to appreciate the beneficient system of the Ph. D. degree, introduced into English universities as a measure of post-war propaganda, whereby the time and energy of those who are qualified to do research are expended in supervising the work of those who never will be.”

“In 1968 Ian Wilson made his final sculpture. Since then, he has explored the idea of oral communication as an art form… Wilson’s work is very hard to track down, even in terms of documentation. He has been compared to the Socratic philosophers but if there is a similarity between his practice and theirs, it probably lies mainly in the fact that everything we have from that period of philosophy takes the form of secondary fragments embedded in other texts. Wilson’s work functions almost like archaeological or geological evidence: it consists of objects that we examine in order to deduce, from scanty clues, what must have happened.”

“As a graduate student I studied mathematics fairly broadly and I was fortunate enough, besides developing the idea which led to "Non-Cooperative Games," also to make a nice discovery relating to manifolds and real algebraic varieties. So I was prepared actually for the possibility that the game theory work would not be regarded as acceptable as a thesis in the mathematics department and then that I could realize the objective of a Ph. D. thesis with the other results.”

“You seem to think that the only genuine existence evil can have is conscious existence - that no one is evil unless he admits it to himself. I disagree.”