Magoroh Maruyama

“Some people fit established categories and are easy to classify. Their thinking and their work fit neatly into the existing social and conceptual order. (…) Their contributions to knowledge are incremental without being disturbing. Such people are easy to understand, to work and get along with. They form the bulk of academe and of the research establishment, and are the mainstay of the intellectual and social order. More often than not, they are also not very original.

“Emphatically, however, Maruyama does not belong to this class of people. By temperament and by historical circumstance he is an outsider. He does not fit. Because he does not fit the established order of things and ideas, he disturbs settled views. As a disturber, he is very successful indeed; and, therefore, very unsuccessful in finding permanent employment, a place, an institution which would allow him to make unhindered and full use of his extraordinary mental capacity and creative energy. Instead, he spends his life moving around the world, one year here, another year elsewhere. In his unending quest for a place which he would fit into, or, perhaps, which would fit him, he changes institutions, countries, languages, cultures and continents.”

— Jerzy A. Wojciechowski, 1994

From "Mindscapes: The Epistemology of Magoroh Maruyama",

edited by Michael T. Caley and Daiyo Sawada

(Gordon and Breach Science Publishers S.A.)