"This person has just arrived on this planet, knows nothing about it, has no standards by which to judge it. This person does not care what it becomes. It is eager to become absolutely anything it is supposed to be."

"Vanity rather than wisdom determines how the world is run."

"Pretty, was she?""Pretty?" he echoed. "Mister, when I see my first lady angel, if God ever sees fit to show me one, it'll be her wings and not her face that'll make my mouth fall open. I've already seen the prettiest face that ever could be."

"We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap."

"When things are going really well, we should take time to notice it."

"The human race is a scummy thing, and so is Earth, and so are you."

"Only one English word adequately describes his transformation of the islands from worthless to priceless: magical."

"All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!"

"She said his music was tuned to the biggest music there ever was, the music of the stars."

"... the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the newgovernment owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, evenafter slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and theirdescendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines."

"How nice-to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."

"Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber."

"Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?"

"I concluded that the best thing for me and for those around me was to want nothing, to be enthusiastic about nothing, to be as unmotivated as possible, in fact, so that I would never again hurt anyone."

"During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high."

"And I am now compelled to wonder if wisdom has ever existed or can ever exist. Might wisdom be as impossible in this particular universe as a perpetual-motion machine?"

"I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind."

"The very best thing you can be in life is a teacher, provided you are crazy in love with what you teach, and that your classes consist of eighteen students or fewer. Classes of eighteen students or fewer are a family, and feel and act like one."

"When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water."

"Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes."

"People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn't own doodley-squat, so they couldn't improve their surroundings. so they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead."

"Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia."

"If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy."

"It appeared to the Elders that the people here would believe anything about themselves, no matter how preposterous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings' heads that the whole Universe had been created by one big animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot of less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives of the Creator.The people down here just ate that up!"

"I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth."

"I have no doubt that they'll tell you a lot of kind things about me when my back is turned. They may not have been behind the door when God passed out the pretty faces, but Heaven only knows where they were when He divided up the gratitude."

"Jesus of Nazareth told us to say these twelve words when we prayed: 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.' ... And for those words alone, he deserves to be called ;the Prince of Peace."

"He had had no experience in asking for a job with a big organization, and Mr. Dilling was making him aware of what a fine art it was--if you couldn't run a machine. A duel was under way."

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."

"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."

"It was literature in its finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free."

"People are hated a lot of places. Claire pointed out in her letter that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty."

"This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed."

"The row was actually about everything in creation, but it had for its subject of the moment the boy's mustache."

"Artists," he said, "are people who say, 'I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!"

"And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."

"I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours."

"To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon."

"It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done."

"As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split."

"I thought the worst of everyone."

"That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old time big brains. They would tell their owners, in effect, 'Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course, it's just fun to think about.'And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it-have slaves fight each other to the death in the Colosseum, or burn people to death in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in indistrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on."

"I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them."

"You can't help it but you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed - so you were a good man just the same."

"One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand."

"I have had some experiences with love, or think I have, anyway, although the ones I have liked best could easily be described as "common decency". I treated somebody well for a little while, or even for a tremendously long time, and that person treated me well in return. Love need not have anything to do with it. (...)Love is where you find it. I think it is foolosh to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, "Please - a little less love, and a little more common decency"."

"The lieutenant-colonel realized for the first time what most people never realize about themselves--that he was not only a victim of outrageous fortune, but one of outrageous fortune's cruelest agents as well."

"What an optimistic animal man is!" said Rumfoord rosily. "Imagine expecting the species to last for ten million more years - as though people were as well-developed as turtles!" He shrugged. "Well - who knows - maybe human beings will last that long, just on the basis of pure cussedness. What's your guess?"

"I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on."

"The name of the new religion," said Rumfoord, "is The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent."