Only the use of footnotes enables historians to make their texts not monologues but conversations, in which modern scholars, their predecessors, and their subjects all take part. – Anthony Grafton (b.1950), The Footnote: A Curious History, “Epilogue: Some Concl

People will accept your idea more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first. – David H. Comins, quoted in The Washingtonian, Volume14, 1978

In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise. – William Irwin Thompson