"I can sculpt a birthday cake out of shit and insist that I obviously mean cake, that my real intent is to wish you a happy birthday, but my intentions and protestations cannot turn crap into a delicious dessert."

“The humanities are despised because they are dangerous. They arm us with the intellectual weapons we need to fight the forces of ignorance and idiocracy, and to free ourselves from freedumb.”

“Laughing at the clueless mouthfarts of cute twenty somethings who spent their high-school years with vocal coaches or plastic surgeons is another variation on the theme "Are we getting dumber?”

“If there is no more market for ancient Greek, there should be no more ancient Greek. If there are no jobs for historians, there should be no history. If there is no money in brains, there should be no brains - except for the brains that make money.”

“Nerds do not think they are better than you. Nerds are better than you, in their particular fields, unless you happen to be an even more devoted nerd.”

“Who teh heLL R u 2 tELL me what 2 reed or how 2 spel?”

“Posthumous fame, book fame, nerd fame is not like the good kind of fame. It might last for centuries and let antique egg heads torture the young from the grave, but it just doesn't pay the bills.”