"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." — Albert Einstein

"When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one’s own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority. The thinker is heeded only for his or her turgid charisma."

— Martha Nussbaum

"With [Jacques] Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, 'He says so and so,' he always says, 'You misunderstood me.' But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy.
     I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking in French. And I said, 'What the hell do you mean by that?' And he said, 'He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying. That’s the obscurantism part. And then when you criticize him, he can always say, "You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot." That’s the terrorism part.'
     And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes."
— John Searle (both quotes from Open Culture)
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"Derrida was the father of ‘deconstructionism,’ a critical practice that questions the foundation of Western thought by exploring the inherent instability present in language. From it ground-breaking conception in Derrida’s 1967 texts, 'Of Grammatology' and 'Writing and Difference,' deconstruction has heralded the death of the author by arguing that meaning has limitless layers of interpretation, not all viable at the conscious level.
     Throughout his life, Derrida wrote hundreds of books and essays that reread and deconstructed great philosophers such as Plato, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche and ideals such as giving and forgiveness. In recent years, deconstruction has become the dominant discourse of academia and has seeped into pop-culture reference."
— Elyse Weingarten, EGO
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"DEBAUCHEE, n. One who has so earnestly pursued pleasure that he has had the misfortune to overtake it." — Ambrose Bierce, (The Devil's Dictionary)

"In the San Francisco of 1876, Ambrose Bierce reigned as unchallenged literary king, the best known writer west of the Rockies. Some of the contemporaries who nourished their lights in Bierce's shadow are much better known today. Bret Harte, Jack London, and Joaquin Miller not only rate larger space in the textbooks, but their works remain easily available. Of Bierce's voluminous writings, only a collection of short stories, In the Midst of Life, and fragments of The Devil's Dictionary are easily obtainable. But if Bierce's literary endeavors have not stood the test of time as well as those of certain of his contemporaries, he still enjoys a last laugh, because the mystery of his strange disappearance is better known than the entire life histories of Harte, London, and Miller….

     Some researchers have speculated that in the tales summarized above [The Spook House, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, An Unfinished Race, and Charles Ashmore's Trail] Bierce was writing horror fiction, Edgar Allan Poe-style. However, none of the accounts were presented as short stories, but as journalistic reports.
     In the collection that I obtained as a teenager [Tales of Haunted Houses], Bierce followed these accounts with a postscript entitled, 'Science to the Front.'
     It seemed to Bierce that the theory of Dr. Hern of Leipzig, which was expounded in the scientist's own book, Verschwindend und Seine Theorie, might offer an explanation for the subject of mysterious disappearances, '… of which every memory is stored with abundant example.'
     According to Bierce, the theories of Dr. Hern had attracted some attention 'particularly among the followers of Hegel, and mathematicians who hold to the actual existence of a so-called non·Euclidean space—that is to say, of space which has more dimensions than length, breadth, and thickness... space in which it would be possible to tie a knot in an endless cord and to turn a rubber ball inside out without a solution of its continuity, or, in other words, without breaking or cracking it.'"
— Brad Steiger, Rense
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Buy Roy Morris Jr.'s book about Ambrose Bierce, and all of Brad Steiger's books here...