Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.
There are circumstances in which suicide presents a viable option; a workable alternative; the only sensible solution.
Three words remain that can yet stir the blood of man: the word 'rebellion'; the word 'revolt'; the word 'revolution'.
In social affairs, I'm an optimist. I really do believe that our military- industrial civilization will soon collapse.
By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.
It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written.
What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most.
Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.
I wouldn't trade a good horse for the best Rolls-Royce ever made -- unless I could trade the Rolls for two good horses.
Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.
When a man must be afraid to drink freely from his country's river and streams that country is no longer fit to live in.
I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.
Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music.
Why must love always be accompanied--sooner or later--by sorrow and pain? Why not? Because pure bliss is for pure idiots.
Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and the powerful.
Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in.
Henry James was our master of periphrasis -- the fine art of saying as little as possible in the greatest number of words.
Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society.
Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by government against its own people.
In the modern technoindustrial culture, it is possible to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood.
Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.
One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill.
We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more mystery.
We live in the kind of world where courage is the most essential of virtues; without courage, the other virtues are useless.
Liberty cannot be guaranteed by law. Nor by any thing else except the resolution of free citizens to defend their liberties.
J. Edgar Hoover, J. Bracken Lee, J. Parnell Thomas, J. Paul Getty -- you can always tell a shithead by that initial initial.
I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patrotism.
Most of us lead lives of chaotic improvisation from day to day, bawling for peace while plunging grimly into fresh disorders.
There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author's self- effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice.
Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere -- particularly if they form loops.
Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give the science of optics the last word on the matter.
Baseball serves as a good model for democracy in action: Every player is equally important and each has a chance to be a hero.
Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony.
A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.
Money confers the power to command the labor of others. Love of money is love of power. And love of power is the root of evil.
What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.
The "terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.
Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff.
If you feel that you're not ready to die, never fear; nature will give you complete and adequate assistance when the time comes.
Doctrines like Christianity or Islam or Marxism require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions.
Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama's lap from alcohol and infantilism.
No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
There are only two kinds of books -- good books and the others. The good are winnowed from the bad through the democracy of time.
Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.
I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving.
My cousin Elroy spent seven years as an IBM taper staring at THINK signs on the walls before he finally got a good idea: He quit.
The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners -- and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.
I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is because I don't believe in endings.
If you feel that you must suffer, then plan your suffering carefully -- as you choose your dreams, as you conceive your ancestors.