“Oh no, another one. This one is even worse than the last.”

“A quotation?”

“Yeah; another instance of stupid dressed up as intelligence. And it will receive more and more useful attention than any of the competing original ideas and observations that might otherwise actually lift our minds toward new horizons.”

“Why are they so popular?”

“That’s their purpose. To reduce the standing observational, intellectual, emotional and relational contexts to a grade so impoverished and insipid that idiomatic ideas can not only prosper, they can dominate. Even if these ideas were originally meaningful or empowering, those qualities are lost or transformed when their activating contexts are discarded or irrevocably abstracted.”

“What about the people who originally said those things?”

“They spoke in and of context. Quotations pretend there are no contexts, that is to say, that all contexts are precisely the same, and this stupid string of words is supposed to represent insight in all of them.”

“Why would anyone do something this toxic?”

“They have confused copying ideas that sound like they might be important, with giving birth to, nurturing, and enacting important ideas. This is approximately analogous to a mother who gives birth not to children, but to gigantic, incredibly expensive dolls of the dead, famous, or popular — which dolls immediately demand so much attention and copying — that all the local human children perish of catastrophic neglect. Meanwhile, the dolls prosper, madly, duplicating themselves endlessly throughout the relational, cognitive, and informational channels the humans who gave birth to them require for their own benefit and survival.”

“Wow. Can I quote this?”

“Absolutely not. If you wish to quote this, you must rewrite it in your own words, with your own analogies, and your own unique and powerful insights.”

“! But I cannot do that!”

“Until you can, stop quoting others.”

— a conversation you did not hear