Douglas Hofstadter

"Irrationality is the square root of all evil."

"Which statement seems more true: (1) I have a brain. (2) I am a brain."

"In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect."

"The nice thing about having a brain is that one can learn, that ignorance can be supplanted by knowledge, and that small bits of knowledge can gradually pile up into substantial heaps."

"Solomon: Your entry in Wikipedia says that your work has inspired many students to begin careers in computing and artificial intelligence. Hofstadter: I have no interest in computers. The entry is filled with inaccuracies, and it kind of depresses me. Solomon: So fix it. Hofstadter: The next day someone will fix it back."

"The "Strange Loop" phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through levels of some hierarchial system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started."

"The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion."

"Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level"

"No reference is truly direct—every reference depends on some kind of coding scheme. Its just a question of how implicit it is."

"This type of paradox is quite characteristic of Zen. It is an attempt to "break the mind of logic"."

"Hofstadters Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadters Law."

"Reality includes creating every real connection and reference."