“The human mind had a remarkable ability both to discount what it sees and make reality conform to expectation.”

“There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.”

“Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.”

“Everything is both a trap and a display; the secret reality of the object is what the Other makes of it.”

“It’s a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you’re a sucker for it: Isn’t story-telling what being human is all about?”

“Complexity has the propensity to overload systems, making the relevance of a particular piece of information not statistically significant. And when an array of mind-numbing factors is added into the equation, theory and models rarely conform to reality.”

“Reality and history, however, are not dialectical, and no idealist rhetorical gymnastics can make them conform to the dialect.”

“The remarkable thing about the human mind is its range of limitations.”

“There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.”

“For this, if for no other reason, degeneration of creative ability in America has had ample support, and what nobility our society might still have is in danger of being submerged in overwhelming tides of rising conformity.”