Essayists from the United States

"He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses."

"I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders."

"Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty."

"Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition."

"Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God."

"Slavery is disheartening; but Nature is not so helpless but it can rid itself of every last wrong. But the spasms of nature are centuries and ages and will tax the faith of short-lived men. Slowly, slowly the Avenger comes, but comes surely. The proverbs of the nations affirm these delays, but affirm the arrival. They say, "God may consent, but not forever." The delay of the Divine Justice — this was the meaning and soul of the Greek Tragedy, — this was the soul of their religion."

"I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "Leaves of Grass." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging..."

"If the colleges were better, if they ... had the power of imparting valuable thought, creative principles, truths which become powers, thoughts which become talents, — if they could cause that a mind not profound should become profound, — we should all rush to their gates: instead of contriving inducements to draw students, you would need to set policy at the gates to keep order in the in-rushing multitude."

"Always put the best interpretation on a tenet. Why not on Christianity, wholesome, sweet, and poetic? It is the record of a pure and holy soul, humble, absolutely disinterested, a trutn-speaker, and bent on serving, teaching, and uplifting men. Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to Jove the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love him was happiness,—to love him in other’s virtues."

"The clergy are as like as peas."

"Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever."

"A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed."

"Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity."

"There are two classes of poets — the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love."

"What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered."

"We are never without a pilot. When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current knows the way, though we do not. The ship of heaven guides itself, and will not accept a wooden rudder."

"To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven."

"When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart."

"The cup of life is not so shallow That we have drained the best That all the wine at once we swallow And lees make all the rest."

"There is a freemasonry among the dull by which they recognize and are sociable with the dull, as surely as a correspondent tact in men of genius."

"The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empires but is not the immutable universal law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth."

"A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking."

"A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befal [sic] him must be from himself. He only can do himself any good or any harm. Nothing can be given to him or can taken from him but always there is a compensation.. There is a correspondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known to man. Instead of studying things without the principles of them, all may be penetrated unto with him. Every act puts the agent in a new position. The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself. He is not to live the future as described to him but to live the real future to the real present. The highest revelation is that God is in every man."

"Everything intercepts us from ourselves."

"No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too."

"Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see — not to eat, not for love, but only gliding."

"We are always getting ready to live, but never living."

"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis."

"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."

"I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom."

"Children are all foreigners."

"Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the state."

"He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is."

"The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence."

"How we hate this solemn Ego that accompanies the learned, like a double, wherever he goes."

"A good indignation brings out all one's powers."

"People say law but they mean wealth."

"People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad."

"You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both."

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."

"The sky is the daily bread of the eyes."

"If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as "spiritual life," "God," "soul," "cross," etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent."

"Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock."

"It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves."

"I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us."

"Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know."

"Blessed are those who have no talent!"

"The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan."

"I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods."

"The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution."

"All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle."

"The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page."

"I have been writing & speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty five or thirty years, & have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me? — they would interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school & no follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence."

"The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco."

"A nation never falls but by suicide."

"You can take better care of your secret than another can."

"Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generation beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?"

"Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth."

"If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile."

"The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood."

"The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title. To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food."

"Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."

"Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue."

"Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous."

"Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact."

"We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox."

"A man is a god in ruins."

"The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man."

"The soul is subject to dollars."

"In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking."

"I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul."

"The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates."

"But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates."

"Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence."

"Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments."

"Character is higher than intellect...A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think."

"Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdom."

"Life is our dictionary."

"Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated."

"Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table."

"What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; — show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; — and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench."

"Do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him."

"We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."

"The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all."

"The man who renounces himself, comes to himself."

"The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself."

"In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God?"

"Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves."

"None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed."

"The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's."

"You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear, that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. "What is this Truth you seek? What is this Beauty?" men will ask, with derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, "As others do, so will I. I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season." — then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history; and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect. ... Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from every object in Nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom."

"Explore, and explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatise yourself, nor accept another's dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope."

"Thought is all light, and publishes itself to the universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous organ. It will flow out of your actions, your manners, and your face. It will bring you friendships. It will impledge you to truth by the love and expectation of generous minds. By virtue of the laws of that Nature, which is one and perfect, it shall yield every sincere good that is in the soul, to the scholar beloved of earth and heaven."

"The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made. This quarrel is the subject of civil history. The conservative party established the reverend hierarchies and monarchies of the most ancient world. The battle of patrician and plebeian, of parent state and colony, of old usage and accommodation to new facts, of the rich and the poor, reappears in all countries and times. The war rages not only in battle-fields, in national councils and ecclesiastical synods, but agitates every man's bosom with opposing advantages every hour. On rolls the old world meantime, and now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities. Such an irreconcilable antagonism of course must have a correspondent depth of seat in the human constitution. It is the opposition of Past and Future, of Memory and Hope, of the Understanding and the Reason. It is the primal antagonism, the appearance in trifles of the two poles of nature."

"It will never make any difference to a hero what the laws are. His greatness will shine and accomplish itself unto the end, whether they second him or not. If he have earned his bread by drudgery, and in the narrow and crooked ways which were all an evil law had left him, he will make it at least honorable by his expenditure. Of the past he will take no heed; for its wrongs he will not hold himself responsible: he will say, All the meanness of my progenitors shall not bereave me of the power to make this hour and company fair and fortunate. Whatsoever streams of power and commodity flow to me, shall of me acquire healing virtue, and become fountains of safety. Cannot I too descend a Redeemer into nature? Whosoever hereafter shall name my name, shall not record a malefactor, but a benefactor in the earth. If there be power in good intention, in fidelity, and in toil, the north wind shall be purer, the stars in heaven shall glow with a kindlier beam, that I have lived. I am primarily engaged to myself to be a public servant of all the gods, to demonstrate to all men that there is intelligence and good will at the heart of things, and ever higher and yet higher leadings. These are my engagements; how can your law further or hinder me in what I shall do to men? On the other hand, these dispositions establish their relations to me. Wherever there is worth, I shall be greeted. Wherever there are men, are the objects of my study and love. Sooner of later all men will be my friends, and will testify in all methods the energy of their regard. I cannot thank your law for my protection. I protect it. It is not in its power to protect me. It is my business to make myself revered. I depend on my honor, my labor, and my dispositions for my place in the affections of mankind, and not on any conventions or parchments of yours."

"That which is best about conservatism, that which, though it cannot be expressed in detail, inspires reverence in all, is the Inevitable."

"There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact."

"The two parties which divide the State, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made ... Now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities ... Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the pause on the last movement."

": Via Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (Houghton Mifflin, 1986) p. 23"

"Gentlemen, there is a sublime and friendly Destiny by which the human race is guided, — the race never dying, the individual never spared, — to results affecting masses and ages. Men are narrow and selfish, but the Genius or Destiny is not narrow, but beneficent. It is not discovered in their calculated and voluntary activity, but in what befalls, with or without their design. Only what is inevitable interests us, and it turns out that love and good are inevitable, and in the course of things. That Genius has infused itself into nature. It indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favorable to the side of reason."

"Our condition is like that of the poor wolves: if one of the flock wound himself, or so much as limp, the rest eat him up incontinently. That serene Power interposes the check upon the caprices and officiousness of our wills."

"It is easy to see that the existing generation are conspiring with a beneficence, which, in its working for coming generations, sacrifices the passing one, which infatuates the most selfish men to act against their private interest for the public welfare. We build railroads, we know not for what or for whom; but one thing is certain, that we who build will receive the very smallest share of benefit. Benefit will accrue; they are essential to the country, but that will be felt not until we are no longer countrymen. We do the like in all matters: — 'Man's heart the Almighty to the Future set By secret and inviolable springs.'"

"We plant trees, we build stone houses, we redeem the waste, we make prospective laws, we found colleges and hospitals, for remote generations."

"This is the value of the Communities; not what they have done, but the revolution which they indicate as on the way."

"We must have kings, and we must have nobles. Nature provides such in every society, — only let us have the real instead of the titular. Let us have our leading and our inspiration from the best. In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise. Let the powers be well directed, directed by love, and they would everywhere be greeted with joy and honor."

"I call upon you, young men, to obey your heart, and be the nobility of this land. In every age of the world, there has been a leading nation, one of a more generous sentiment, whose eminent citizens were willing to stand for the interests of general justice and humanity, at the risk of being called, by the men of the moment, chimerical and fantastic. Which should be that nation but these States? Which should lead that movement, if not New England? Who should lead the leaders, but the Young American?"

"Each the herald is who wrote His rank, and quartered his own coat. There is no king nor sovereign state That can fix a hero's rate."

"I saw men go up and down, In the country and the town, With this tablet on their neck,— 'Judgement and a judge we seek.' Not to monarchs they repair, Nor to learned jurist's chair; But they hurry to their peers, To their kinsfolk and their dears; Louder than with speech they pray,— 'What am I? companion, say.'"

"Each to each a looking-glass, Reflects his figure that doth pass. Every wayfarer he meets What himself declared repeats, What himself confessed records, Sentences him in his words; The form is his own corporal form, And his thought the penal worm. Yet shine forever virgin minds, Loved by stars and the purest winds, Which, o'er passion throned sedate, Have not hazarded their state; Disconcert the searching spy, Rendering to a curious eye The durance of a granite ledge To those who gaze from the sea's edge. It is there for benefit; It is there for purging light; There for purifying storms; And its depths reflect all forms; It cannot parley with the mean,— Pure by impure is not seen. For there's no sequestered grot, Lone mountain tarn, or isle forgot, But Justice, journeying in the sphere, Daily stoops to harbour there."

"Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend; I am not thine."

"For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?"

"Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent: All are needed by each one, Nothing is fair or good alone."

"I wiped away the weeds and foam, And fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar."

"Announced by all the trumpets of the sky Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden's end."

"And when his hours are numbered, and the world Is all his own, retiring, as he were not, Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work, The frolic architecture of the snow."

"Life is too short to waste The critic bite or cynic bark, Quarrel, or reprimand; 'Twill soon be dark; Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed the mark!"

"For there's no rood has not a star above it; The cordial quality of pear or plum Ascends as gladly in a single tree, As in broad orchards resonant with bees; And every atom poises for itself, And for the whole."

"But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together To make up a year, And a sphere."

"Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; If I cannot carry forests on my back, Neither can you crack a nut."

"Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing, Then beauty is its own excuse for Being."

"Go where he will, the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome."

"Whoso walketh in solitude, And inhabiteth the wood, Choosing light, wave, rock, and bird, Before the money-loving herd, Into that forester shall pass From these companions power and grace."

"For nature beats in perfect tune, And rounds with rhyme her every rune, Whether she work in land or sea, Or hide underground her alchemy. Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake."

"The horseman serves the horse, The neatherd serves the neat, The merchant serves the purse, The eater serves his meat; 'Tis the day of the chattel, Web to weave, and corn to grind; Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind."

"There are two laws discrete Not reconciled, Law for man, and law for thing."

"Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young And always keep us so."

"Give all to love; Obey thy heart; Friends, kindred, days, Estate, good fame, Plans, credit, and the muse; Nothing refuse."

"Though thou loved her as thyself, As a self of purer clay, Tho' her parting dims the day, Stealing grace from all alive, Heartily know, When half-gods go, The gods arrive."

"But these young scholars who invade our hills, Bold as the engineer who fells the wood, And travelling often in the cut he makes, Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names."

"The silent organ loudest chants The master's requiem."

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. The foe long since in silence slept; Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; And Time the ruined bridge has swept Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. On this green bank, by this soft stream, We set to-day a votive stone; That memory may their deed redeem, When, like our sires, our sons are gone. Spirit, that made those heroes dare, To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee."

"Hast thou named all the birds without a gun; Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk."

"Earth laughs in flowers to see her boastful boys Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs; Who steer the plough, but can not steer their feet Clear of the grave."

"Pass in, pass in, the angels say, In to the upper doors; Nor count compartments of the floors, But mount to Paradise By the stairway of surprise."

"Thou animated torrid-zone."

"Seeing only what is fair, Sipping only what is sweet, Thou dost mock at fate and care."

"I like a church, I like a cowl, I love a prophet of the soul, And on my heart monastic aisles Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles; Yet not for all his faith can see, Would I that cowled churchman be. Why should the vest on him allure, Which I could not on me endure?"

"Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought."

"Out from the heart of Nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old."

"The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity, Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew, The conscious stone to beauty grew."

"Earth proudly wears the Parthenon As the best gem upon her zone."

"The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome."

"He is great who is what he is from Nature, and who never reminds us of others."

"When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field the next man will appear."

"Every hero becomes a bore at last."

"It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes; yet how splendid is that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men."

"Great geniuses have the shortest biographies."

"Things added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly attractive."

"Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence."

"Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?"

"Thought is the property of him who can entertain it, and of him who can adequately place it."

"What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?"

"Act, if you like,—but you do it at your peril. Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament. The fiery reformer embodies his aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he and his friends cleave to the form, and lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established Quakerism, the Shaker has established his monastery and his dance; and, although each prates of spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is anti-spiritual."

"In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation."

"The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance."

"How can he [today's writer] be honored, when he does not honor himself; when he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public."

"The thing done avails, and not what is said about it. An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures."

"Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig."

"The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue."

"Solvency is maintained by means of the national debt, on the principle, "If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?""

"I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses, — mettle and bottom."

"A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence."

"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."

"Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it."

"Men are what their mothers made them."

"Whatever limits us we call Fate."

"In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, — seven or eight ancestors at least, — and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is."

"Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these the fruit of his character."

"That what we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us."

"All the great speakers were bad speakers at first."

"As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues."

"We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself withersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power."

"Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and wind out; in a good pump that yields you plenty of sweet water; in two suits of clothes, so to change your dress when you are wet; in dry sticks to burn; in a good double-wick lamp; and three meals; in a horse, or a locomotive, to cross the land; in a boat to cross the sea; in tools to work with; in books to read; and so, in giving, on all sides, by tolls and auxiliaries, the greatest possible extension to our powers, as if it added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to the day, and knowledge, and good-will. Wealth begins with these articles of necessity."

"The world is his, who has money to go over it."

"Art is a jealous mistress."

"If a man own land, the land owns him."

"Money often costs too much."

"The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do."

"You can never do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late."

"I have been quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to do justice. I think, there is a restlessness in our people, which argues want of character. All educated Americans, first or last, go to Europe; — perhaps, because it is their mental home, as the invalid habits of this country might suggest. An eminent teacher of girls said, "the idea of a girl's education, is, whatever qualifies them for going to Europe." Can we never extract this tape-worm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen?"

"Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend."

"I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home? I have been quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to do justice. .... He that does not fill a place at home, cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his insignificance in a larger crowd. You do not think you will find anything there which you have not seen at home? The stuff of all countries is just the same. Do you suppose there is any country where they do not scald milk-pans, and swaddle the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the fish? What is true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries."

"The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later."

"The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war."

"We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples."

"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons."

"Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances...Strong men believe in cause and effect."

"People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character."

"I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant."

"Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can."

"Bad times have a scientific value. [...] We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea."

"Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any."

"Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live."

"Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them."

"Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better."

"Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait."

"Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful."

"If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time."

"All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle."

"Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth."

"I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life. Children, youths, adults, and old men, all are led by one bawble or another. Yoganidra, the goddess of illusion, Proteus, or Momus, or Gylfi's Mocking, — for the Power has many names, — is stronger than the Titans, stronger than Apollo."

"There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, — now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned."

"Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others, and this is a gift interred only by the self."

"The highest compact we can make with our fellow, is, — "Let there be truth between us two forevermore"."

"'Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence."

"The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye."

"Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others."

"There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future: the Establishment and the Movement. At times the resistance is reanimated, the schism runs under the world and appears in Literature, Philosophy, Church, State and social customs."

"The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself. Men grew reflective and intellectual. There was a new consciousness. The former generations acted under the belief that a shining social prosperity was the beatitude of man, and sacrificed uniformly the citizen to the State. The modern mind believed that the nation existed for the individual, for the guardianship and education of every man. This idea, roughly written in revolutions and national movements, in the mind of the philosopher had far more precision; the individual is the world. This perception is a sword such as was never drawn before. It divides and detaches bone and marrow, soul and body, yea, almost the man from himself. It is the age of severance, of dissociation, of freedom, of analysis, of detachment. Every man for himself. The public speaker disclaims speaking for any other; he answers only for himself. The social sentiments are weak; the sentiment of patriotism is weak; veneration is low; the natural affections feebler than they were. People grow philosophical about native land and parents and. relations. There is an universal resistance to ties rand ligaments once supposed essential to civil society. The new race is stiff, heady and rebellious; they are fanatics in freedom; they hate tolls, taxes, turnpikes, banks, hierarchies, governors, yea, almost laws. They have a neck of unspeakable tenderness; it winces at a hair. They rebel against theological as against political dogmas; against mediation, or saints, or any nobility in the unseen. The age tends to solitude. The association of the time is accidental and momentary and hypocritical, the detachment intrinsic and progressive. The association is for power, merely, — for means; the end being the enlargement and independency of the individual."

"The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives."

"God said, I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more; Up to my ear the morning brings The outrage of the poor."

"To-day unbind the captive, So only are ye unbound; Lift up a people from the dust, Trump of their rescue, sound!"

"None shall rule but the humble, And none but Toil shall have."

"O tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire; One morn is in the mighty heaven, And one in our desire."

"United States! the ages plead, — Present and Past in under-song, — Go put your creed into your deed, Nor speak with double tongue."

"I think no virtue goes with size; The reason of all cowardice Is, that men are overgrown, And, to be valiant, must come down To the titmouse dimension."

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can."

"Whoever fights, whoever falls, Justice conquers evermore."

"England's genius filled all measure Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure, Gave to the mind its emperor, And life was larger than before: Nor sequent centuries could hit Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit. The men who lived with him became Poets, for the air was fame."

"Nor mourn the unalterable Days That Genius goes and Folly stays."

"Born for success he seemed, With grace to win, with heart to hold, With shining gifts that took all eyes."

"Fear not, then, thou child infirm, There's no god dare wrong a worm."

"He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread."

"Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill."

"Deep in the man sits fast his fate To mould his fortunes, mean or great."

"For the prevision is allied Unto the thing so signified; Or say, the foresight that awaits Is the same Genius that creates."

"Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands."

"It is time to be old, To take in sail: — The god of bounds, Who sets to seas a shore, Came to me in his fatal rounds, And said: 'No more!"

"Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime."

"Though love repine, and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply, — "'T is man's perdition to be safe When for the truth he ought to die.""

"If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again."

"Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame."

"They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt; And I the hymn the Brahmin sings."

"In the vaunted works of Art The master stroke is Nature's part."

"Ever from one who comes to-morrow Men wait their good and truth to borrow."

"The music that can deepest reach, And cure all ill, is cordial speech."

"Some of your hurts you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you endured From evils which never arrived!"

"A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs, The world uncertain comes and goes; The lover rooted stays."

"What potent blood hath modest May!"

"And striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form."

"And every man, in love or pride, Of his fate is ever wide."

"Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die."

"God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth."

"We boil at different degrees."

"The best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs."

"The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it."

"The days .... come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away."

"Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?"

"A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days."

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year."

"Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science."

"A third illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, "God works in moments," — "En peu d'heure Dieu labeure." We ask for long life, but 't is deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance, — what ample borrowers of eternity they are! Life culminates and concentrates; and Homer said, "The Gods ever give to mortals their appointed share of reason only on one day.""

"Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines."

"'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear."

"Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good."

"We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count."

"There is no knowledge that is not power."

"Hitch your wagon to a star."

"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization."

"The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most."

"The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out."

"Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun."

"Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration."

"A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal."

"Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it."

"Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age."

"Nothing can be preserved that is not good."

"Never read any book that is not a year old."

"I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue."

"Science does not know its debt to imagination."

"Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time."

"Music is the poor man's Parnassus."

"The imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man."

"Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy."

"I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared "that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow"."

"Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary."

"The law of the table is beauty, a respect to the common soul of the guests. Everything is unreasonable which is private to two or three, or any portion of the company. Tact never violates for a moment this law; never intrudes the orders of the house, the vices of the absent, or a tariff of expenses, or professional privacies; as we say, we never “talk shop” before company. Lovers abstain from caresses, and haters from insults, while they sit in one parlor with common friends."

"This world belongs to the energetic."

"Every really able man, in whatever direction he work,—a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter,—if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be."

"Every artist was first an amateur."

"Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfillment."

"Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master at some point, and in that, I learn of him."

"A good symbol is the best argument and is a missionary to persuade thousands."

"Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, and no force of character can make any stand against good wit."

"The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible."

"Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors."

"In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity."

"Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody."

"The heroic cannot be the common, nor can the common be heroic."

"The gods sell anything to everybody at a fair price."

"Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it."

"The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it."

"A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good."

"Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life.""

"By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote."

"Now shall we say that only the first men were well alive, and the existing generation is invalided and degenerate? ... A more subtle and severe criticism might suggest that some dislocation has befallen the race; that men are off their centre; that multitudes of men do not live with Nature, but behold it as exiles. People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority."

"We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul."

"Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent."

"In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent."

"There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant."

"To live without duties is obscene."

"There are men who astonish and delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better."

"Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude."

"I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion."

"Every man is a new method."

"A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,— congestion of the brain, apoplexy, and strangulation."

"Characters and talents are complemental and suppletory. The world stands by balanced antagonisms. The more the peculiarities are pressed the better the result. The air would rot without lightning; and without the violence of direction that men have, without bigots, without men of the fixed idea, no excitement, no efficiency. The novelist should not make any character act absurdly, but only absurdly as seen by others. For it is so in life. Nonsense will not keep its unreason if you come into the humorist's point of view, but unhappily we find it is fast becoming sense, and we must flee again into the distance if we would laugh."

"What strength belongs to every plant and animal in nature. The tree or the brook has no duplicity, no pretentiousness, no show. It is, with all its might and main, what it is, and makes one and the same impression and effect at all times. All the thoughts of a turtle are turtles, and of a rabbit, rabbits. But a man is broken and dissipated by the giddiness of his will; he does not throw himself into his judgments; his genius leads him one way but 't is likely his trade or politics in quite another."

"The poor, short lone fact dies at birth. Memory catches it up into her heaven and bathes it in immortal waters."

"The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny."

"So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person’s genius is confined to a very few hours."

"I hung my verse in the wind Time and tide their faults will find."

"Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know."

"Every man I meet is in some way my superior, and in that, I can learn of him."

"You must read Plato. But you must hold him at arm's length and say, 'Plato, you have delighted and edified mankind for two thousand years. What have you to say to me?'"

"I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him."

"I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible"

"What is there in 'Paradise Lost' to elevate and astonish like Herschel or Somerville?"

"It is sublime as night and a breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics, which visit in turn each noble poetic mind .... It is of no use to put away the book if I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond. Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently: eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken silence .... This is her creed. Peace, she saith to me, and purity and absolute abandonment - these panaceas expiate all sin and bring you to the beatitude of the Eight Gods."

"Plato was synthesis of Europe and Asia, and a decidedly Oriental element pervades his philosophy, giving it a sunrise color."

"The Indian teaching, through its clouds of legends, has yet a simple and grand religion, like a queenly countenance seen through a rich veil. It teaches to speak truth, love others, and to dispose trifles. The East is grand - and makes Europe appear the land of trifles .... all is soul and the soul is Vishnu ... cheerful and noble is the genius of this cosmogony. Hari is always gentle and serene - he translates to heaven the hunter who has accidentally shot him in his human form, he pursues his sport with boors and milkmaids at the cow pens; all his games are benevolent and he enters into flesh to relieve the burdens of the world."

"[The Upanishads and the Vedas] haunt me. In them I have found eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken peace."

"When Confucius and the Indian Scriptures were made known, no claim to monopoly of ethical wisdom could be thought of... It is only within this century [the 1800 's] that England and America discovered that their nursery tales were old German and Scandinavian stories; and now it appears that they came from India, and are therefore the property of all the nations."

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world."

"For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?"

"If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. 6."

"The virtues of society are the vices of the saints."

"The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool."

"In skating over thin ice our safety is our speed."

"Shallow men believe in luck."

"Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right."

"The faith that stands on authority is not faith."

"God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose."

"His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong."

"Self-trust is the first secret of success."

"No congress, nor mob, nor guillotine, nor fire, nor all together, can avail, to cut out, burn, or destroy the offense of superiority in persons. The superiority in him is inferiority in me."

"Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment."

"Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum. And here they will break out into their native music, and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns, and they mope and wallow like dogs!"

"I have seen manners that make a similar impression with personal beauty, that give the like exhilaration and refine us like that; and in memorable experiences they are suddenly better than beauty, and make that superfluous and ugly. But they must be marked by fine perception, the acquaintance with real beauty. They must always show control; you shall not be facile, apologetic, or leaky, but king over your word; and every gesture and action shall indicate power at rest. They must be inspired by the good heart. There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around us."

"Nature is the best posture-master."

"The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have genius or a prodigious usefulness if you will hide the want of measure."

"Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the One breaks in everywhere."

"Nature is no sentimentalist, — does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ships like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons."

"Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of Nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is million fathoms deep."

"The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat, — men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority — demanding, not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice — comes graceful and beloved as a bride!"

"Self-command is the main elegance."

"The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure."

"Revolutions never go backwards."

"The activity of to-day and the assurance of to-morrow."

"We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter we stand by the old — reformers in the morning, conservatives at night. Reform is affirmative, conservatism is negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth."

"Natural religion supplies still all the facts which are disguised under the dogma of popular creeds. The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals."

"The best lightning-rod for your protection is your own spine."

"Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debaucher of sentiment?"

"His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand to embody any capricious thought that is uppermost in her mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together by a subtle spiritual connection."

"Skepticism is slow suicide."

"Society undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet; he has a fine Geneva watch, but cannot tell the hour by the sun."

"These preachers of beauty, which light the world with their admonishing smile."

"A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection."

"It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no."

"There is a kind of latent omniscience not only in every man but in every particle."

"The next thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one"

"An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory."

"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting—a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing."

"To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."

"As soon as there is life there is danger."

"Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door."

"Variation: If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he builds his house in the woods the world will make a beaten path to his door."

"When it is dark enough, you can see the stars."

"Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen."

"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."

"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well."

"For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness."

"No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing."

"So gentle that he seemed only reading to one person, and yet his voice was so distinct that it filled the room in its lowest tones."

"That which struck me most, as distinguishing him from most other human beings, is nobility. He is a born nobleman."

"It was a maxim with him that power is not so much shown in talent or in successful performance as in tone; the absolute or the victorious tone ... He disliked limitations, and welcomed whatever promised to get rid of them, without always inquiring very closely what was left when they were removed."

"We, as we read," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in an essay on history, "must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly."

"England laughed at American authorship and we sent her Emerson..."

"Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists...Emerson supported territorial expansion at any cost but would have preferred it take place without war."

"He is the most original mind America has hitherto produced."

"He is a perfect swimmer on the ocean of modern existence. He dreads no tempest, for he is sure that calm will follow it."

"[A] great original thinker, who had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. ... People that had lighted on a new thought or a thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary."

"[N]o one has had so steady and constant and above all so natural, a vision of what we require and what we are capable of in the way of aspiration and independence."

"He liked to taste but not to drink—least of all to become intoxicated."

"Emerson: German philosophy that in crossing the great water took some on underway."

"I love Emerson, I just had a problem with something I read in his journal. He was talking about Asians. Chinese, specifically. He said they had no culture to speak of, no music. He said they're not even as good as the Africans, who are at least willing to carry our wood. And he said that they've done nothing useful except manage "to preserve to a hair / for three or four thousand years / the ugliest features in the world." The poem begins by looking at the face of this butcher. So it's about that-it's about countenance, and it's about what the culture defines as beauty or ugliness. It's a weird wrestling I'm doing with Emerson. I can't imagine me without Emerson. And yet there's this thing about him that gets to me. That's deep in the culture."

"What, then, is his secret? Is it not that he out-Yankees us all? that his range includes us all? that he is equally at home with the potato disease and original sin, with pegging shoes and the Over-soul? that, as we try all trades, so has he tried all cultures? and above all, that his mysticism gives us a counterpoise to our super-practicality?"

"There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so many of us feel and thankfully acknowledge so great an indebtedness for ennobling impulses."

"There was a majesty about him beyond all other men I have known, and he habitually dwelt in that ampler and diviner air to which most of us, if ever, only rise in spurts."

"Modern technics, even apart from the special arts that it fostered, had a cultural contribution to make in its own right. Just as science underlined the respect for fact, so technics emphasized the importance of function: in this domain, as Emerson pointed out, the beautiful rests on the foundation of the necessary."

"A cheery, child-like soul, impervious to the evidence of evil."

"Emerson broke away from all conditions of age or country and represented nothing except intelligence itself."

"I love Emerson, the first great American writer."

"Virtually at the same time as Kierkegaard gave philosophical significance to moods, Emerson was doing the same. In "Experience" he characterized our life experiences as "a train of moods" that color whatever we encounter, and he described life as "a flux of moods" that affect our "states of mind.""

"Emerson's prose is full of poetry, and his poems are light and air. ... His modes of expression, like his epithets, are imaginative."

"We are told of his mode of preparing an essay,—of the slow-growing medley of thoughts on a topic, at last brought out and strung at random, like a child's variegated beads."

"He began where many poets end, seeking at once the upper air, the region of pure thought and ideality. ... Emerson was the freest and most ideal of them all, and what came to him by inheritance or prophetic forecast he gave like a victor."

"American self-confidence, Emerson argued, should be grounded not in a narrow chauvinistic claim about the superiority of the American way but rather in a mature affirmation of America's gifts to the world as well as candid acknowledgment of the "most un-handsome part of our condition." Cheap American patriotism not only reflects an immaturity and insecurity, he warned, but also is an adolescent defense mechanism that reveals a fear to engage the world and learn from others. Narrow nationalism is a handmaiden of imperial rule, he argues-it keeps the populace deferential and complacent. Hence it abhors critics and dissenters like Emerson who unsettle and awaken the people. His shining example of democratic intellectual work is a challenge to us today. This challenge has been taken up through the years by a stream of Emersonian voices-from Walt Whitman to William James, Gertrude Stein. W. E. B. Du Bois, and Muriel Rukeyser."

"Even when provocation was great, his satire was so gentle and genial that it warmed even its object."

"School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers."

"It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism."

"Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."

"Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."

"The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived. Huxley laughed the devils out of the Gadarene swine. Not the laws of the United States but the mother-in-law joke brought the Mormons to surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of it killed the doctrine of infant damnation. But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth. How loudly the barber-surgeons laughed at Huxley—and how vainly! What clown ever brought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Darwin? . . . They are laughing at Nietzsche yet . . ."

"The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it."

"No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs."

"If there is one mental vice, indeed, which sets off the American people from all other folks who walk the earth ... it is that of assuming that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that ninety-nine percent of them are wrong."

"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing."

"The allurement that [women] hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating."

"Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man."

"The bitter, of course, goes with the sweet. To be an American is, unquestionably, to be the noblest, grandest, the proudest mammal that ever hoofed the verdure of God's green footstool. Often, in the black abysm of the night, the thought that I am one awakens me with a blast of trumpets, and I am thrown into a cold sweat by contemplation of the fact. I shall cherish it on the scaffold; it will console me in Hell. But there is no perfection under Heaven, so even an American has his small blemishes, his scarcely discernible weaknesses, his minute traces of vice and depravity."

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

"Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient."

"It is a fact that no man improves much after the age of 60 and after 65, most suffer a really alarming decline. I could give some examples, but at the advice of my publisher will refrain from doing so."

"Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God."

"Socialism is the theory that the desire of one man to get something he hasn't got is more pleasing to a just God than the desire of some other man to keep what he has got."

"The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think."

"At the bottom of Puritanism one finds envy of the fellow who is having a better time in the world, and hence hatred of him. At the bottom of democracy one finds the same thing. This is why all Puritans are democrats and all democrats are Puritans."

"Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got used to it."

"Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they didn't, they'd be married, too."

"The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation."

"To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies — the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said — there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident."

"Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual."

"Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals."

"I was at the job of reading it for days and days, endlessly daunted and halted by its laborious dullness, its flatulent fatuity, its almost fabulous inconsequentiality."

"The public...demands certainties...But there are no certainties."

"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."

"All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else."

"The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man — that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense — has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading."

"To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia — to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess."

"To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!"

"A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meets the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative."

"Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world."

"Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent — the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free."

"The American of today, in fact, probably enjoys less personal liberty than any other man of Christendom, and even his political liberty is fast succumbing to the new dogma that certain theories of government are virtuous and lawful, and others abhorrent and felonious. Laws limiting the radius of his free activity multiply year by year: It is now practically impossible for him to exhibit anything describable as genuine individuality, either in action or in thought, without running afoul of some harsh and unintelligible penalty. It would surprise no impartial observer if the motto "In God we trust" were one day expunged from the coins of the republic by the Junkers at Washington, and the far more appropriate word, "verboten," substituted. Nor would it astound any save the most romantic if, at the same time, the goddess of liberty were taken off the silver dollars to make room for a bas-relief of a policeman in a spiked helmet. Moreover, this gradual (and, of late, rapidly progressive) decay of freedom goes almost without challenge; the American has grown so accustomed to the denial of his constitutional rights and to the minute regulation of his conduct by swarms of spies, letter-openers, informers and agents provocateurs that he no longer makes any serious protest."

"The American is marked, in fact, by precisely the habits of mind and act that one would look for in a man insatiably ambitious and yet incurably fearful, to wit, the habits, on the one hand, of unpleasant assertiveness, of somewhat boisterous braggardism, of incessant pushing, and, on the other hand, of conformity, caution and subservience. He is forever talking of his rights as if he stood ready to defend them with his last drop of blood, and forever yielding them up at the first demand."

"It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull."

"How does so much [false news] get into the American newspapers, even the good ones? Is it because journalists, as a class, are habitual liars, and prefer what is not true to what is true? I don't think it is. Rather, it is because journalists are, in the main, extremely stupid, sentimental and credulous fellows -- because nothing is easier than to fool them -- because the majority of them lack the sharp intelligence that the proper discharge of their duties demands."

"All of us, if we are of reflective habit, like and admire men whose fundamental beliefs differ radically from our own. But when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or count himself lost. ... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

"The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights."

"To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride."

"If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl."

"All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are."

"To be happy one must be (a) well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion, (b) full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one's fellow men, and (c) delicately and unceasingly amused according to one's taste. It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country in the world wherein a man constituted as I am — a man of my peculiar weakness, vanities, appetites, and aversions — can be so happy as he can be in the United States."

"When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything."

"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. A Galileo could no more be elected President of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome."

"My literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly upon one idea, to wit, the idea of freedom. I am, in belief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety."

"The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty — and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies."

"Critical note.—Of a piece with the absurd pedagogical demand for so-called constructive criticism is the doctrine that an iconoclast is a hollow and evil fellow unless he can prove his case. Why, indeed, should he prove it? Is he judge, jury, prosecuting officer, hangman? He proves enough, indeed, when he proves by his blasphemy that this or that idol is defectively convincing—that at least one visitor to the shrine is left full of doubts. The fact is enormously significant; it indicates that instinct has somehow risen superior to the shallowness of logic, the refuge of fools. The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians—and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse. The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe—that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent."

"The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught."

"What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."

"Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?"

"The strange American ardor for passing laws, the insane belief in regulation and punishment, plays into the hands of the reformers, most of them quacks themselves. Their efforts, even when honest, seldom accomplish any appreciable good. The Harrison Act, despite its cruel provisions, has not diminished drug addiction in the slightest. The Mormons, after years of persecution, are still Mormons, and one of them is now a power in the Senate. Socialism in the United States was not laid by the Espionage Act; it was laid by the fact that the socialists, during the war, got their fair share of the loot. Nor was the stately progress of osteopathy and chiropractic halted by the early efforts to put them down. Oppressive laws do not destroy minorities; they simply make bootleggers."

"I propose that it shall be no longer malum in se for a citizen to pummel, cowhide, kick, gouge, cut, wound, bruise, maim, burn, club, bastinado, flay, or even lynch a [government] jobholder, and that it shall be malum prohibitum only to the extent that the punishment exceeds the jobholder's deserts. The amount of this excess, if any, may be determined very conveniently by a petit jury, as other questions of guilt are now determined. The flogged judge, or Congressman, or other jobholder, on being discharged from hospital — or his chief heir, in case he has perished — goes before a grand jury and makes a complaint, and, if a true bill is found, a petit jury is empaneled and all the evidence is put before it. If it decides that the jobholder deserves the punishment inflicted upon him, the citizen who inflicted it is acquitted with honor. If, on the contrary, it decides that this punishment was excessive, then the citizen is adjudged guilty of assault, mayhem, murder, or whatever it is, in a degree apportioned to the difference between what the jobholder deserved and what he got, and punishment for that excess follows in the usual course."

"This preposterous quackery flourishes lushly in the back reaches of the Republic, and begins to conquer the less civilized folk of the big cities. As the oldtime family doctor dies out in the country towns, with no competent successor willing to take over his dismal business, he is followed by some hearty blacksmith or ice-wagon driver, turned into a chiropractor in six months, often by correspondence. In Los Angeles the Damned there are probably more chiropractors than actual physicians, and they are far more generally esteemed. Proceeding from the Ambassador Hotel to the heart of the town, along Wilshire Boulevard, one passes scores of their gaudy signs; there are even many chiropractic "hospitals." The morons who pour in from the prairies and deserts, most of them ailing, patronize these "hospitals" copiously, and give to the chiropractic pathology the same high respect that they accord to the theology of the town sorcerers. That pathology is grounded upon the doctrine that all human ills are caused by the pressure of misplaced vertebrae upon the nerves which come out of the spinal cord—in other words, that every disease is the result of a pinch. This, plainly enough, is buncombe. The chiropractic therapeutics rest upon the doctrine that the way to get rid of such pinches is to climb upon a table and submit to a heroic pummeling by a retired piano-mover. This, obviously, is buncombe doubly damned."

"Do they believe that the aim of teaching English is to increase the exact and beautiful use of the language? Or that it is to inculcate and augment patriotism? Or that it is to diminish sorrow in the home? Or that it has some other end, cultural, economic, or military? ... it was their verdict by a solemn referendum that the principal objective in teaching English was to make good spellers, and that after that came the breeding of good capitalizers. ... I have maintained for years, sometimes perhaps with undue heat: that pedagogy in the United States is fast descending to the estate of a childish necromancy, and that the worst idiots, even among pedagogues, are the teachers of English. It is positively dreadful to think that the young of the American species are exposed day in and day out to the contamination of such dark minds. What can be expected of education that is carried on in the very sewers of the intellect? How can morons teach anything that is worth knowing?"

"Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter. A democratic state may profess to venerate the name, and even pass laws making it officially sacred, but it simply cannot tolerate the thing. In order to keep any coherence in the governmental process, to prevent the wildest anarchy in thought and act, the government must put limits upon the free play of opinion. In part, it can reach that end by mere propaganda, by the bald force of its authority — that is, by making certain doctrines officially infamous. But in part it must resort to force, i.e., to law. One of the main purposes of laws in a democratic society is to put burdens upon intelligence and reduce it to impotence. Ostensibly, their aim is to penalize anti-social acts; actually their aim is to penalize heretical opinions. At least ninety-five Americans out of every 100 believe that this process is honest and even laudable; it is practically impossible to convince them that there is anything evil in it. In other words, they cannot grasp the concept of liberty. Always they condition it with the doctrine that the state, i.e., the majority, has a sort of right of eminent domain in acts, and even in ideas — that it is perfectly free, whenever it is so disposed, to forbid a man to say what he honestly believes. Whenever his notions show signs of becoming "dangerous," i.e, of being heard and attended to, it exercises that prerogative. And the overwhelming majority of citizens believe in supporting it in the outrage. Including especially the Liberals, who pretend — and often quite honestly believe — that they are hot for liberty. They never really are. Deep down in their hearts they know, as good democrats, that liberty would be fatal to democracy — that a government based upon shifting and irrational opinion must keep it within bounds or run a constant risk of disaster. They themselves, as a practical matter, advocate only certain narrow kinds of liberty — liberty, that is, for the persons they happen to favor. The rights of other persons do not seem to interest them. If a law were passed tomorrow taking away the property of a large group of presumably well-to-do persons — say, bondholders of the railroads — without compensation and without even colorable reason, they would not oppose it; they would be in favor of it. The liberty to have and hold property is not one they recognize. They believe only in the liberty to envy, hate and loot the man who has it."

"I have seen many theoretical objections to democracy, and sometimes urge them with such heat that it probably goes beyond the bound of sound taste, but I am thoroughly convinced, nonetheless, that the democratic nations are happier than any other. The United States today, indeed, is probably the happiest the world has ever seen. Taxes are high, but they are still well within the means of the taxpayer: he could pay twice as much and still survive. The laws are innumerable and idiotic, but only prisoners in the penitentiaries and persons under religious vows ever obey them. The country is governed by rogues, but there is no general dislike of rogues: on the contrary, they are esteemed and envied. Best of all, the people have the pleasant feeling that they can make improvements at any time they want to— . . . in other words, they are happy. Democrats are always happy. Democracy is a sort of laughing gas. It will not cure anything, perhaps, but it unquestionably stops the pain."

"Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone-that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is, far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The man of the educated minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them, perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized- though I should not like to be put to giving names, but the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge."

"Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands."

"It is the national custom to sentimentalize the dead, as it is to sentimentalize men about to be hanged. Perhaps I fall into that weakness here. The Bryan I shall remember is the Bryan of his last weeks on earth -- broken, furious, and infinitely pathetic. It was impossible to meet his hatred with hatred to match it. He was winning a battle that would make him forever infamous wherever enlightened men remembered it and him. Even his old enemy, Darrow, was gentle with him at the end. That cross-examination might have been ten times as devastating. It was plain to everyone that the old Berserker Bryan was gone -- that all that remained of him was a pair of glaring and horrible eyes. But what of his life? Did he accomplish any useful thing? Was he, in his day, of any dignity as a man, and of any value to his fellow-men? I doubt it. Bryan, at his best, was simply a magnificent job-seeker. The issues that he bawled about usually meant nothing to him. He was ready to abandon them whenever he could make votes by doing so, and to take up new ones at a moment's notice. For years he evaded Prohibition as dangerous; then he embraced it as profitable. At the Democratic National Convention last year he was on both sides, and distrusted by both. In his last great battle there was only a baleful and ridiculous malignancy. If he was pathetic, he was also disgusting. Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not."

"Once more, alas, I find myself unable to follow the best Liberal thought. What the World's contention amounts to, at bottom, is simply the doctrine that a man engaged in combat with superstition should be very polite to superstition. This, I fear, is nonsense. The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame. True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. . . . They are free to shoot back. But they can't disarm their enemy. The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us. . . . What should be a civilized man's attitude toward such superstitions? It seems to me that the only attitude possible to him is one of contempt. If he admits that they have any intellectual dignity whatever, he admits that he himself has none. If he pretends to a respect for those who believe in them, he pretends falsely, and sinks almost to their level. When he is challenged he must answer honestly, regardless of tender feelings."

"By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally and even brilliantly, and the other capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds of Baptist evangelists? Such balderdash takes various forms, but it is at its worst when it is religious. Why should this be so? What is there in religion that completely flabbergasts the wits of those who believe in it? I see no logical necessity for that flabbergasting. Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for. In other fields such hypotheses are common, and yet they do no apparent damage to those who incline to them. But in the religious field they quickly rush the believer to the intellectual Bad Lands. He not only becomes anaesthetic to objective fact; he becomes a violent enemy of objective fact. It annoys and irritates him. He sweeps it away as something somehow evil. . ."

"Herein lies the value of free speech. It makes concealment difficult, and, in the long run, impossible. One heretic, if he is right, is as good as a host. He is bound to win in the long run. It is thus no wonder that foes of the enlightenment always begin their proceedings by trying to deny free speech to their opponents. It is dangerous to them and they know it. So they have at it by accusing these opponents of all sorts of grave crimes and misdemeanors, most of them clearly absurd – in other words, by calling them names and trying to scare them."

"It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false. To admit that the false has any standing in court, that it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it—to admit this, as the more fatuous of the reconcilers of science and religion inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and without excuse. It is, of course, quite true that there is a region in which science and religion do not conflict. That is the region of the unknowable."

"Here is tragedy—and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum."

"The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel."

"The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense."

"No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."

"It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground."

"Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured and put into cans."

"I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave."

"Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian."

"No man ever entered the White House under the burden of a more inconvenient past. And no President was ever denounced with greater ferocity. -- said of Andrew Jackson"

"The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone. All it accomplishes is (a) to throw a veil of sanctity about ideas that violate every intellectual decency, and (b) to make every theologian a sort of chartered libertine. No doubt it is mainly to blame for the appalling slowness with which really sound notions make their way in the world. The minute a new one is launched, in whatever field, some imbecile of a theologian is certain to fall upon it, seeking to put it down. The most effective way to defend it, of course, would be to fall upon the theologian, for the only really workable defense, in polemics as in war, is a vigorous offensive. But the convention that I have mentioned frowns upon that device as indecent, and so theologians continue their assault upon sense without much resistance, and the enlightenment is unpleasantly delayed. There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly. If you doubt it, then ask any pious fellow of your acquaintance to put what he believes into the form of an affidavit, and see how it reads... . "I, John Doe, being duly sworn, do say that I believe that, at death, I shall turn into a vertebrate without substance, having neither weight, extent nor mass, but with all the intellectual powers and bodily sensations of an ordinary mammal; . . . and that, for the high crime and misdemeanor of having kissed my sister-in-law behind the door, with evil intent, I shall be boiled in molten sulphur for one billion calendar years." Or, "I, Mary Roe, having the fear of Hell before me, do solemnly affirm and declare that I believe it was right, just, lawful and decent for the Lord God Jehovah, seeing certain little children of Beth-el laugh at Elisha's bald head, to send a she-bear from the wood, and to instruct, incite, induce and command it to tear forty-two of them to pieces." Or, "I, the Right Rev._____ _________, Bishop of _________,D.D., LL.D., do honestly, faithfully and on my honor as a man and a priest, declare that I believe that Jonah swallowed the whale," or vice versa, as the case may be. No, there is nothing notably dignified about religious ideas. They run, rather, to a peculiarly puerile and tedious kind of nonsense. At their best, they are borrowed from metaphysicians, which is to say, from men who devote their lives to proving that twice two is not always or necessarily four. At their worst, they smell of spiritualism and fortune telling. Nor is there any visible virtue in the men who merchant them professionally. Few theologians know anything that is worth knowing, even about theology, and not many of them are honest. One may forgive a Communist or a Single Taxer on the ground that there is something the matter with his ductless glands, and that a Winter in the south of France would relieve him. But the average theologian is a hearty, red-faced, well-fed fellow with no discernible excuse in pathology. He disseminates his blather, not innocently, like a philosopher, but maliciously, like a politician. In a well-organized world he would be on the stone-pile. But in the world as it exists we are asked to listen to him, not only politely, but even reverently, and with our mouths open."

"The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. . . . Certainly it would be difficult to imagine any committee of relatively young men, of thirty or thirty-five, showing the unbroken childishness, ignorance and lack of humor of the Supreme Court of the United States. The average age of the learned justices must be well beyond sixty, and all of them are supposed to be of finished and mellowed sagacity. Yet their knowledge of the most ordinary principles of justice often turns out to be extremely meager, and when they spread themselves grandly upon a great case their reasoning powers are usually found to be precisely equal to those of a respectable Pullman conductor."

"There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of Milton is that he functions as a Milton."

"Truth, indeed, is something that is believed in completely only by persons who have never tried personally to pursue it to its fastness and grab it by the tail. It is the adoration of second-rate men — men who always receive it as second-hand. Pedagogues believe in immutable truths and spend their lives trying to determine them and propagate them; the intellectual progress of man consists largely of a concerted effort to block and destroy their enterprise. Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed. In whole departments of human inquiry it seems to me quite unlikely that the truth ever will be discovered. Nevertheless, the rubber-stamp thinking of the world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth — that error and truth are simply opposites. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one. This is the whole history of the intellect in brief. The average man of today does not believe in precisely the same imbecilities that the Greek of the Fourth Century before Christ believed in, but the things that he does believe in are often quite as idiotic. Perhaps this statement is a bit too sweeping. There is, year by year, a gradual accumulation of what may be called, provisionally, truths — there is a slow accretion of ideas that somehow manage to meet all practicable human tests, and so survive. But even so, it is risky to call them absolute truths. All that one may safely say of them is that no one, as yet, has demonstrated that they are errors. Soon or late, if experience teaches us anything, they are likely to succumb too. The profoundest truths of the Middle Ages are now laughed at by schoolboys. The profoundest truths of democracy will be laughed at, a few centuries hence, even by school-teachers."

"Upon the low value of "constructive" criticism I can offer testimony out of my own experience. My books have been commonly reviewed at length, and many critics have devoted themselves to pointing out what they conceive to be my errors, both of fact and of taste. Well, I cannot recall a case in which any suggestion offered by a "constructive" critic has helped me in the slightest, or even actively interested me. Every such wet-nurse of letters has sought fatuously to make me write in a way differing from that in which the Lord God Almighty, in His infinite wisdom, impels me to write — that is, to make me write stuff which, coming from me, would be as false as an appearance of decency in a Congressman. All the benefits I have ever got from the critics of my work have come from the destructive variety. A hearty slating always does me good, particularly if it be well written. It begins by enlisting my professional respect; it ends by making me examine my ideas coldly in the privacy of my chamber. Not, of course, that I usually revise them, but I at least examine them. If I decide to hold fast to them, they are all the dearer to me thereafter, and I expound them with a new passion and plausibility. If, on the contrary, I discern holes in them, I shelve them in a pianissimo manner, and set about hatching new ones to take their place. But "constructive" criticism irritates me. I do not object to being denounced, but I can't abide being schoolmastered, especially by men I regard as imbeciles."

"Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice."

"The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom."

"The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history... But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it! Put it into the cold words of everyday! The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth". It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves."

"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable."

"A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable, for disappointment, being essentially an objective phenomenon, cannot permanently affect his subjective infirmity. His faith takes on the virulence of a chronic infection. What he usually says, in substance, is this: "Let us trust in God, who has always fooled us in the past."

"The professor must be an obscurantist or he is nothing; he has a special and unmatchable talent for dullness, his central aim is not to expose the truth clearly, but to exhibit his profundity, his esotericity - in brief to stagger sophomores and other professors."

"No man, I suppose, ever admits to himself candidly that he gets his living in a dishonourable way."

"Democratic man, dreaming eternally of Utopias, is ever a prey to shibboleths."

"Democratic man can understand the aims and aspirations of capitalism; they are, greatly magnified, simply his own aims and aspirations."

"An aristocratic society may hold that a soldier or a man of learning is superior to a rich manufacturer or banker, but in a democratic society the latter are inevitably put higher, if only because their achievement is more readily comprehended by the inferior man, and he can more easily imagine himself, by some favour of God, duplicating it."

"My business is not prognosis, but diagnosis. I am not engaged in therapeutics, but in pathology."

"Democracy is shot through with this delight in the incredible, this banal mysticism. I have alluded to its touching acceptance of the faith that progress is illimitable and ordained of God - that every human problem, in the very nature of things, may be solved."

"Democracy, in fact, is always inventing class distinctions, despite its theoretical abhorrence of them."

"What is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism."

"The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and pretends to believe it himself."

"Ostensibly he is an altruist devoted whole-heartedly to the service of his fellow-men, and so abjectly public-spirited that his private interest is nothing to him. Actually, he is a sturdy rogue whose principal, and often sole aim in life is to butter his parsnips. His technical equipment consists simply of an armamentarium of deceits. It is his business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying he will hold it by lying. if lying peters out he will try and hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground."

"It is moral by his code to get into office by false pretences. It is moral to change convictions overnight. Anything is moral that furthers the main concern of his soul, which is to keep a place at the public trough."

"For what democracy needs most of all is a party that will separate the good that is in it theoretically from the evils that beset it practically, and then try to erect that good into a workable system. What it needs beyond everything is a party of liberty. It produces, true enough, occasional libertarians, just as despotism produces occasional regicides, but it treats them in the same drum-head way. It will never have a party of them until it invents and installs a genuine aristocracy, to breed them and secure them.*"

"Thus the ideal of democracy is reached at last: it has become a psychic impossibility for a gentleman to hold office under the Federal Union, save by a combination of miracles that must tax the resourcefulness even of God. The fact has been rammed home by a constitutional amendment: every office-holder, when he takes oath to support the Constitution, must swear on his honour that, summoned to the death-bed of his grandmother, he will not take the old lady a bottle of wine. He may say so and do it, which makes him a liar, or he may say so and not do it, which makes him a pig. But despite that grim dilemma there are still idealists, chiefly professional Liberals, who argue that it is the duty of a gentleman to go into politics—that there is a way out of the quagmire in that direction. The remedy, it seems to me, is quite as absurd as all the other sure cures that Liberals advocate. When they argue for it, they simply argue, in words but little changed, that the remedy for prostitution is to fill the bawdyhouses with virgins. My impression is that this last device would accomplish very little: either the virgins would leap out of the windows, or they would cease to be virgins."

"Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without. The free man is one who has won a small and precarious territory from the great mob of his inferiors, and is prepared and ready to defend it and make it support him. All around him are enemies, and where he stands there is no friend. He can hope for little help from other men of his own kind, for they have battles of their own to fight. He has made of himself a sort of god in his little world, and he must face the responsibilities of a god, and the dreadful loneliness."

"What the common man longs for in this world, before and above all his other longings, is the simplest and most ignominious sort of peace: the peace of a trusty in a well-managed penitentiary. He is willing to sacrifice everything else to it. He puts it above his dignity and he puts it above his pride. Above all, he puts it above his liberty. The fact, perhaps, explains his veneration for policemen, in all the forms they take–his belief that there is a mysterious sanctity in law, however absurd it may be in fact. A policeman is a charlatan who offers, in return for obedience, to protect him (a) from his superiors, (b) from his equals, and (c) from himself. This last service, under democracy, is commonly the most esteemed of them all. In the United States, at least theoretically, it is the only thing that keeps ice-wagon drivers, Y.M.C.A. secretaries, insurance collectors and other such human camels from smoking opium, ruining themselves in the night clubs, and going to Palm Beach with Follies girls . . . Under the pressure of fanaticism, and with the mob complacently applauding the show, democratic law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity."

"I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself—its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity."

"Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. I have rehearsed some of its operations against liberty, the very cornerstone of its political metaphysic. It not only wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world. Try to imagine monarchy jailing subjects for maintaining the divine right of Kings! Or Christianity damning a believer for arguing that Jesus Christ was the Son of God! This last, perhaps, has been done: anything is possible in that direction. But under democracy the remotest and most fantastic possibility is a common place of every day. All the axioms resolve themselves into thundering paradoxes, many amounting to downright contradictions in terms. The mob is competent to rule the rest of us—but it must be rigorously policed itself. There is a government, not of men, but of laws—but men are set upon benches to decide finally what the law is and may be. The highest function of the citizen is to serve the state—but the first assumption that meets him, when he essays to discharge it, is an assumption of his disingenuousness and dishonour. Is that assumption commonly sound? Then the farce only grows the more glorious. I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights me. I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself—that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can't make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?"

"Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle — a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism. It is the aim of the Bill of Rights, if it has any remaining aim at all, to curb such prehensile gentry. Its function is to set a limitation upon their power to harry and oppress us to their own private profit. The Fathers, in framing it, did not have powerful minorities in mind; what they sought to hobble was simply the majority. But that is a detail. The important thing is that the Bill of Rights sets forth, in the plainest of plain language, the limits beyond which even legislatures may not go. The Supreme Court, in Marbury v. Madison, decided that it was bound to execute that intent, and for a hundred years that doctrine remained the corner-stone of American constitutional law."

"All the benefit that a New Yorker gets out of Kansas is no more than what he might get out of Saskatchewan, the Argentine pampas, or Siberia. But New York to a Kansan is not only a place where he may get drunk, look at dirty shows and buy bogus antiques; it is also a place where he may enforce his dunghill ideas upon his betters."

"Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith."

"I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind — that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking. I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious. I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty; and the democratic form is as bad as any of the other forms. I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect. I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech — alike for the humblest man and the mightiest, and in the utmost freedom of conduct that is consistent with living in organized society. I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run. I believe in the reality of progress. I —But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant."

"To a clergyman lying under a vow of chastity any act of sex is immoral, but his abhorrence of it naturally increases in proportion as it looks safe and is correspondingly tempting. As a prudent man, he is not much disturbed by incitations which carry their obvious and certain penalties; what shakes him is the enticement bare of any probable secular retribution. Ergo, the worst and damndest indulgence is that which goes unwhipped. So he teaches that it is no sin for a woman to bear a child to a drunken and worthless husband, even though she may believe with sound reason that it will be diseased and miserable all its life, but if she resorts to any mechanical or chemical device, however harmless, to prevent its birth, she is doomed by his penology to roast in Hell forever, along with the assassin of orphans and the scoundrel who forgets his Easter duty."

"The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered they lack any of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude, such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display."

"One hears murmurs against Mussolini on the ground that he is a desperado: the real objection to him is that he is a politician. Indeed, he is probably the most perfect specimen of the genus politician on view in the world today. His career has been impeccably classical. Beginning life as a ranting Socialist of the worst type, he abjured Socialism the moment he saw better opportunities for himself on the other side, and ever since then he has devoted himself gaudily to clapping Socialists in jail, filling them with castor oil, sending blacklegs to burn down their houses, and otherwise roughing them. Modern politics has produced no more adept practitioner."

"What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings, and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story."

"If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday."

"Fascism is not likely to be identical with the kinds on tap in Germany, Italy and Russia; indeed, it is very apt to come in under the name of anti-Fascism."

"No man can get anywhere in this world in any really and endurable manner without some recourse to books."

"When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel."

"Having lived all my life in a country swarming with messiahs, I have been mistaken, perhaps quite naturally, for one myself, especially by the others. It would be hard to imagine anything more preposterous. I am, in fact, the complete anti-Messiah, and detest converts almost as much as I detest missionaries. My writings, such as they are, have had only one purpose: to attain for H. L. Mencken that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk. Further than that, I have had no interest in the matter whatsoever. It has never given me any satisfaction to encounter one who said my notions had pleased him. My preference has always been for people with notions of their own. I have believed all my life in free thought and free speech—up to and including the utmost limits of the endurable."

"In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms."

"A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker."

"I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. I am against any man and any organization which seeks to limit or deny that freedom. . . [and] the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men."

"The state — or, to make the matter more concrete, the government — consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."

"I well recall my emotions when I came upon the grave of Beethoven in the Central Friedhof, with its incomparable guard of honor — Mozart, Schubert, Gluck, Brahms, Hugo Wolf and Johann Strauss!"

"Nature abhors a moron."

"The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."

"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking."

"Immorality is the morality of those who are having a better time. You will never convince the average farmer's mare that the late Maud S. was not dreadfully immoral."

"An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup."

"A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know."

"Platitude — An idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true."

"Remorse — Regret that one waited so long to do it."

"Self-respect — The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious."

"Truth — Something somehow discreditable to someone."

"We are here and it is now: further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine."

"Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it."

"Historian — An unsuccessful novelist."

"Christian — One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife."

"The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace."

"Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage."

"The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God's chillun, but that as soon as he has any luck he owes it to the Devil."

"Judge — A law student who marks his own examination-papers."

"Jury — A group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him."

"Lawyer — One who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation."

"Jealousy is the theory that some other fellow has just as little taste."

"Wealth — Any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband."

"Misogynist — A man who hates women as much as women hate one another."

"A man may be a fool and not know it — but not if he is married."

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."

"In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican."

"Theology — An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing."

"Creator — A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh."

"Sunday — A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell."

"A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier."

"Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends."

"Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here? A: Why do men go to zoos?"

"A man who has throttled a bad impulse has at least some consolation in his agonies, but a man who has throttled a good one is in a bad way indeed."

"When women kiss, it always reminds one of prize-fighters shaking hands."

"In every unbeliever's heart there is an uneasy feeling that, after all, he may awake after death and find himself immortal. This is his punishment for his unbelief. This is the agnostic's Hell."

"Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

"The lunatic fringe wags the underdog."

"If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x × y is less than y."

"Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another."

"No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not."

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."

"I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it."

"My guess is that well over eighty per cent of the human race goes through life without ever having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before, and by thousands. A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable. The pressure of ideas would simply drive it frantic. The normal human society is very little troubled by them. Whenever a new one appears the average man displays signs of dismay and resentment. The only way he can take in such a new idea is by translating it crudely into terms of more familiar ideas. That translation is one of the chief functions of politicians, not to mention journalists. They devote themselves largely to debasing the ideas launched by their betters. This debasement is intellectually reprehensible, but probably necessary to carry on the business of the world."

"Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable."

"No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious."

"God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters."

"Equality before the law is probably forever inattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges."

"Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent. Indeed, it would not be far wrong to describe the best as the common enemy of all decent citizens. But there will be small hope of gaining adherents to this idea so long as government is thought of as an independent and somehow super-human organism, with powers, rights, and privileges transcending those of any other human aggregation."

"There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing."

"It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money."

"The fact that what are commonly spoken of as rights are often really privileges is demonstrated in the case of the Jews. They resent bitterly their exclusion from certain hotels, resorts and other places of gathering, and make determined efforts to horn in. But the moment any considerable number of them horns in, the attractions of the place diminish, and the more pushful Jews turn to one where they are still nicht gewuenscht."

"Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives. There has been no organized effort to keep government down since Jefferson's day. Ever since then the American people have been bolstering up its powers and giving it more and more jurisdiction over their affairs. They pay for that folly in increased taxes and diminished liberties. No government as such is ever in favor of the freedom of the individual. It invariably seeks to limit that freedom, if not by overt denial, then by seeking constantly to widen its own functions."

"Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time."

"The main thing that every political campaign in the United States demonstrates is that the politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people's money. No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man."

"I am one of the few Goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other Goyim. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish."

"The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious."

"The State is not force alone. It depends upon the credulity of man quite as much as upon his docility. Its aim is not merely to make him obey, but also to make him want to obey."

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right...The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds."

"The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling. Probably the worst thing that has happened in America in my time is the decay of confidence in the courts. No one can be sure any more that in a given case they will uphold the plainest mandate of the Constitution. On the contrary, everyone begins to be more or less convinced in advance that they won't. Judges are chosen not because they know the Constitution and are in favor of it, but precisely because they appear to be against it."

"Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers."

"The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic."

"My old suggestion that public offices be filled by drawing lots, as a jury box is filled, was probably more intelligent than I suspected. It has been criticized on the ground that selecting a man at random would probably produce some extremely bad State governors. [...] But I incline to believe that it would be best to choose members of the Legislature quite at random. No matter how stupid they were, they could not be more stupid than the average legislator under the present system. Certainly, they'd be measurably more honest, taking one with another. Finally, there would be the great advantage that all of them had got their jobs unwillingly, and were eager, not to spin out their sessions endlessly, but to get home as soon as possible."

"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts."

"The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good."

"The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses."

"The Jewish theory that the Goyim envy the superior ability of the Jews is not borne out by the facts. Most Goyim, in fact, deny that the Jew is superior, and point in evidence to his failure to take the first prizes: he has to be content with the seconds. No Jewish composer has ever come within miles of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms; no Jew has ever challenged the top-flight painters of the world, and no Jewish scientist has equaled Newton, Darwin, Pasteur or Mendel. In the latter bracket such apparent exception as Ehrlich, Freud and Einstein are only apparent. Ehrlich, in fact, contributed less to biochemical fact than to biochemical theory, and most of his theory was dubious. Freud was nine-tenths quack, and there is sound reason for believing that even Einstein will not hold up: in the long run his curved space may be classed with the psychosomatic bumps of Gall and Spurzheim. But whether this inferiority of the Jew is real or only a delusion, it must be manifest that it is generally accepted. The Goy does not, in fact, believe that the Jew is better than the non-Jew; the most he will admit is that the Jew is smarter at achieving worldly success. But this he ascribes to sharp practices, not to superior abilities."

"Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact."

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure.""

"[Paul Patterson and I] soon got on the subject of the war, and I said flatly that I thought the Sun's course was not only ignorant and absurd, but also not a little disingenuous. It had gone over to the English in an abject and ignominious fashion, against all reason and all the obvious facts. Worse, it had yielded supinely to the most outrageous fiats of the Roosevelt censorship, and had even exceeded them. This shook Patterson somewhat, for he likes to think of himself as a news editor, and he insisted that in handling the war news the Sun had done good work."

"...I have given my whole life to newspapers. I am convinced that they have abandoned their functions, and in an abject and ignominious manner, in the present war. Nine-tenths of them, and even more than nine-tenths, print the official blather without any attempt to scrutinize it... It is a disgraceful spectacle, but I do not believe that anything can be done about it. Roosevelt has taken the press into camp as certainly has he has taken the Supreme Court. It has ceased altogether to be independent and has become docilely official."

"I was wise to quit writing for the Sun back in January, 1941, for it was obvious by then that Roosevelt would horn into the war soon or late, and I knew by bitter experience in the last war that I'd be throttled at once. Since then I have thought out many likely articles, but not one of them has been printable. In these days, indeed, my very vocabulary is prohibited. I couldn't so much as mention Roosevelt or Churchill or any of the other frauds without having to face a savage official onslaught, with all blows directed below the belt. The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh."

"The Sun editorial on Roosevelt this morning begins: "Franklin D. Roosevelt was a great man." ...The argument, in brief, is that all his skullduggeries and imbecilities were wiped out when "he took an inert and profoundly isolationist people and brought them to support a necessary war on a scale never before imagined." In other words, his greatest fraud was his greatest glory, and his sufficient excuse for all his other frauds. It seems to me to be very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history -- maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln... He had every quality that morons esteem in their heros. It will be to the interest of all his heirs and assigns to whoop him up, and they will probably succeed in swamping his critics."

"[Roosevelt] was always... finding new victims to loot and new followers to reward, flouting common sense, and boldly denying its existence, demonstrating by his anti-logic that two and two made five, promising larger and larger slices of the moon. His career will greatly engage historians, if any good ones ever appear in America, but it will be of even more interest to psychologists. He was the first American to penetrate to the real depths of vulgar stupidity. He never made the mistake of overestimating the intelligence of the American mob. He was its unparalleled professor."

"The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace."

"Though the theology of Christianity had thus sunk to the lowly estate of a mere delusion of the rabble, propagated on that level by the ancient caste of sacerdotal parasites, the ethics of Christianity continued to enjoy the utmost acceptance, and perhaps even more acceptance than ever before. It seemed to be generally felt, in fact, that they simply must be saved from the wreck—that the world would vanish into chaos if they went the way of the revelations supporting them. In this fear a great many judicious men joined, and so there arose what was, in essence, an absolutely new Christian cult—a cult, to wit, purged of all the supernaturalism superimposed upon the older cult by generations of theologians, and harking back to what was conceived to be the pure ethical doctrine of Jesus."

"Men in the mass never brook the destructive discussion of their fundamental beliefs, and that impatience is naturally most evident in those societies in which men in the mass are most influential. Democracy and free speech are not facets of one gem; democracy and free speech are eternal enemies."

"The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped."

"Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact."

"Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity—he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched against the fit."

"This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world."

"Politics, under a democracy, reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat; even when a superior man prevails at that disgusting game he must prevail at the cost of his self-respect. Not many superior men make the attempt. The average great captain of the rabble, when he is not simply a weeper over irremediable wrongs, is a hypocrite so far gone that he is unconscious of his own hypocrisy—a slimy fellow, offensive to the nose."

"Of all the religions ever devised by the great practical jokers of the race, [Christianity] is the one that offers most for the least money, so to speak, to the inferior man. It starts out by denying his inferiority in plain terms: all men are equal in the sight of God. It ends by erecting that inferiority into a sort of actual superiority: it is a merit to be stupid, and miserable, and sorely put upon—of such are the celestial elect. Not all the eloquence of a million Nietzsches, nor all the painful marshalling of evidence of a million Darwins and Harnacks, will ever empty that great consolation of its allure. The most they can ever accomplish is to make the superior orders of men acutely conscious of the exact nature of it, and so give them armament against the contagion."

"“Away with your croakings about the futility of life,” he wrote in the summer of 1915. “That it is meaningless I grant you, but surely not futile. So long as there is the joy of a job well-done—whether an epic, a fried egg or a murder—there will be plenty of excuses for remaining alive.”"

"I yield so easily, not because I am not intensely interested, but because I long since came to the conclusion that it is wholly impossible for one human being to understand another’s point of view. Each of us is eternally isolated."

"The old town will not give you the time of your life; it is not a brazen hussy among cities, blinding you with its xanthous curls, kicking up its legs, inviting you to exquisite deviltries. Not at all. It is, if the truth must come out, a Perfect Lady. But for all its resultant narrowness, its niceness, its air of merely playing at being a city, it has, at bottom, the one quality which, in cities as in women, shames and survives all the rest. And that is the impalpable, indefinable, irresistible quality of charm."

"“What is this Christian Science stuff that Marion is unloading on me by the gallon?” Mencken asked Estelle in September 1919. “Has she really fallen for that buncombe? I am amazed…the thing is pishposh. Its fundamental ideas are idiotic….Is she simply kidding me? I surely hope so.”"

"To one ineradicable prejudice I freely confess, and that is a prejudice against poverty. I never have anything to do, if it is possible, with anyone who is in financial difficulties…Such persons do not excite my compassion; they excite my aversion…The blame, so far as my experience runs, always lies within."

"The Puritan’s utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous persecution—theses things have put an almost unbearable burden upon the exchange of ideas in the United States."

"He was not pious. He drank whiskey whenever he felt chilly, and kept a jug of it handy. He knew far more profanity than Scripture, and used and enjoyed it more. He had no belief in the infallible wisdom of the lower classes, but regarded them as inflammatory dolts, and tried to save the republic from them. He took no interest in the private morals of his neighbors."

"He slept more than any other President, whether by day or by night….He had no ideas, but he was not a nuisance."

"In matters of personality, he had more in common with Hemingway than either man acknowledged—not only a combative spirit and a devotion to the cult of masculinity but also an abhorrence of romanticism and a nearly compulsive desire for order. Mencken’s creed, stated later in his memoirs, is a close cousin of Hemingway’s own. “Competence, indeed,” Mencken was to write, “is my chief admiration…And next to competence I put what is called being a good soldier—that is, not whining.”"

"In particular, he was receptive to black writers, without question more helpful than any other editor of his time. Both W.E.B. Du Bois and the poet Countee Cullen appeared in the Mercury’s pages during its first year, and in later issues poets James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes and future NAACP head Walter F. White were represented. Indeed, the black journalist George S. Schuyler, who contributed nine essays to the Mercury, was to appear more frequently in the magazine in the final six years of Mencken’s editorship than any other writer, white or black."

"There is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or a hanging. It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious, it is hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus, and yet it is somehow charming. One sits through long sessions wishing heartily that all the delegates and alternates were dead and in hell—and then suddenly there comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour."

"They were common folk, and their commonness radiated from them like heat from a stove….The wheelbarrow handle, it was plain, was more familiar to the men in that long line than the golf-stick, and the washtub had engaged the women far oftener than the lipstick. But what of it? The klan is not a club for snobs, it is a device for organizing inferiorities into a mystical superiority."

"The God business is really quite simple. No sane man denies that the universe presents phenomena quite beyond human understanding, and so it is a fair assumption that they are directed by some understanding that is superhuman. But that is as far as sound thought can go. All religions pretend to go further. That is, they pretend to explain the unknowable….Anyone who pretends to say what God wants or doesn’t want, and what the whole show is about, is simply an ass."

"My engagement to AP is off. Her husband made pedantic objections to it."

"The matter of “right and wrong” was a subject in which he had long been interested. Indeed, it had been a deeply personal concern ever since, early in his career, he had detected a great distinction between morality and honor. “I have never met a thoroughly moral man who was honorable,” he had written in Prejudices, by which he had meant that fervently moral men would employ any means, including dishonorable ones, to achieve their ends."

"He confronted the moment as he had faced all other painful moments, without the consolation of religion or philosophy. “I can well understand why the more naive sort of people cling to the hope of a reunion after death,” he wrote of that late May day. “But I do not share it.”"

"For all his compassion for family and close friends he lacked a larger compassion, one that embraced people whom he did not know or care for personally."

"As for younger writers, Mencken wrote a friend in 1935, “all…seem to be headed toward the left….The left-wing movement…is bound to be transient, but while it lasts it has pretty well killed intelligent criticism in this country. Books are judged not by their worth as works of art, but by their political content…”"

"Thus, rhetorically at least, he lived life more dramatically than most other mortals, attempted more, risked more, said more, and said it more colorfully on a wider range of subjects than perhaps any other writer of his generation. The result, depending on what he came out with at any given time, was that he appeared to be both the best friend and the worst enemy of Jews, blacks, and numerous other segments of the population. The truth is that a hundred statements could be chosen to “prove” Mencken anti-Semitic and a hundred to “prove” he was not."

"My belief is that every man after fifty-five is always ill more or less."

"Her ashes are buried at the foot of the grave of my mother, and beside her there is room for mine. Thinking of her, I can well understand the great human yearning that makes for a belief in immortality, but I do not believe in it, and neither did she. We have parted forever, though my ashes will soon be mingling with hers. I’ll have her in mind until thought and memory adjourn, but that is all…We were happy together, but all beautiful things must end."

"I noted this almost universal respect for wealth early in life, and have put it to profitable use ever since. That is, I have always pretended to be a great deal better heeled than I am in fact. It has got me deference in quarters where, otherwise, I might have been scorned, and materially eased my days."

"[The dry martini is] the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet."

"I don't have prejudice, I hate everyone equally."

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

"When I hear artists or authors making fun of business men, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks."

"When the water reaches the upper deck, follow the rats."

"Few would balk at using Viagra or Cialis to enhance sexual performance, but many more find it objectionable to use drugs such as amphetamines to improve the sexual experience. I don't entirely know why this is the case, but my guess is that it has something to do with the misguided puritanical values that are so pervasive in our education and that disproportionately regulate our behaviors. I think H. L. Mencken put it best when he defined puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.""

"How did one of America's seemingly great rationalists and modernists come to regard Roosevelt as more worthy of condemnation than Hitler? The answer, on the evidence of this and other studies, is that Mencken was a German nationalist, an insecure small-town petit bourgeois, a childless hypochondriac with what seems on the evidence of these pages to have been a room-temperature libido, an antihumanist as much as an atheist, a man prone to the hyperbole and sensationalism he distrusted in others and not as easy with the modern world and its many temptations and diversions as he liked it to be supposed."

"We should welcome his appearance among us here, for we have sore need of critics who hate humbug."

"After sober and judicious consideration, and weighing one thing against another in the interests of reasonable compromise, H. L. Mencken concluded that a startling and dramatic improvement in American education required only that we hang all the professors and burn down the schools. His uncharacteristically moderate proposal was not adopted."

"I hope you will understand my hesitation in writing to one whom I admire as the greatest representative of a philosophy to which I want to dedicate my whole life."

"When H. L. Mencken unpacks his idiomatic brasses, tunes up his verbal strings, and gets in readiness his phrasal wood winds to orchestrate a fugue in damnation or in praise of man, god or book, his all too meagre audience cancels all other engagements to be on hand at the initial presentation. The result, that audience knows, will be an experience of pure enjoyment. His musicianship is unfailing. His program is unsatisfactory only in its impermanence. Though the theme he proposes is invariably Mencken — Mencken apropos of this or that — he gives it infinite and intricate variations."

"The history of the world is the history of a privileged few."

"Real awareness comes intermittently, in brief flashes of a second’s duration. The man who can hold it for a minute, relatively speaking, inevitably changes the whole trend of the world. In the span of ten or twenty thousand years a few widely isolated individuals have striven to break the deadlock, shatter the trance, as it were. Their efforts, if we look at the present state of the world superficially, seem to have been ineffectual. And yet the example which their lives afford us points conclusively to one thing, that the real drama of men on earth is concerned with Reality, and not with the creation of civilizations which permit the great mass of men to snore more or less blissfully. A man who wanted to live would not waste even a fraction of a moment in the invention, creation and perpetuation of instruments of death."

"Men are more or less reconciled to the thought of death, but they also know that it is not necessary to kill one another. They know it intermittently, just as they know other things which they conveniently proceed to forget where there is danger of having their sleep disturbed. To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were only capable of staying awake long enough to let the idea soak in. But man refuses to stay awake because if he did, he would be obliged to become something other than he now is, and the thought of that is apparently too painful for him to endure. If man were to come to grips with his real nature, if he were to discover his real heritage, he would become so exalted, or else so frightened, that he would find it impossible to go to sleep again. To live would be a perpetual challenge to create. But the very thought of a possible, swift and endless metamorphosis terrifies him. He sleeps now, not comfortably to be sure, but certainly more and more obstinately, in the womb of a creation whose only need of verification is his own awakening."

"Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk."

"She was to me, and still is, the greatest person I have known - one who can truly be called a "devoted" soul. I owe her everything."

"A guy who's always interested in the condition of the world, and changing it, either has no problems of his own, or refuses to face them... not wanting to face things of his own nature."

"This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will."

"I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive."

"There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books."

"Well, I'll take these pages and move on. Things are happening elsewhere. Things are always happening. It seems wherever I go there is drama. People are like lice - they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It's in the blood now - misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch, until there's no skin left. However, the effect upon me is exhilarating. Instead of being discouraged or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want every one to scratch himself to death."

"For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens."

"It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. Paris is the cradle of artificial births. Rocking here in the cradle each one slips back into his soil; one dreams back to Berlin, New York, Chicago, Vienna, Minsk,. Vienna is never more Vienna than Paris. Everything is raised to its apotheosis. The cradle gives up its babes and new ones take their place. You can real here on the walls Zola lived and Balzac and Dante and Strindberg and everybody who ever was anything. Everyone has lived here some time or other. Nobody dies here. . ."

"I am a free man-and I need my freedom. I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company. What do you want of me? When I have something to say, I put it in print. When I have something to give, I give it. Your prying curiosity turns my stomach! Your compliments humiliate me. Your tea poisons me! I owe nothing to anyone, I would've responsible to God alone-if he existed!"

"Sleep, Napoleon! It was not your ideas they wanted, it was your corpse."

"To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere and still not enough, and then no money or a little money or less money or more money, but money, always money, and if you have money or you don't have money it is the money that counts and money makes money, but what makes money make money?"

"Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood."

"Take a good look at me. Now tell me, do you think I'm the sort of fellow who gives a fuck what happens once he's dead?"

"He saw the humorous aspect of everything, which is the real test of the tragic sense."

"What an astounding thing is the voice! By what miracle is the hot magma of the earth transformed into that which we call speech? If out of clay such an abstract medium as words can be shaped what is to hinder us from leaving our bodies at will and taking up our abode on other planets or between the planets? What is to prevent us from rearranging all life, atomic, molecular, corporeal, stellar, diving? Who or what is powerful enough to eradicate this miraculous leaven which we bear within us like a seed and which, after we have embraced in our mind all the universe, is nothing more than a seed — since to say universe is as easy as to say seed, and we have yet to say greater things, things beyond saying, things limitless and inconceivable, things which no trick of language can encompass."

"To be free, as I then knew myself to be, is to realize that all conquest is vain, even the conquest of self, which is the last act of egotism. To be joyous is to carry the ego to its last summit and to deliver it triumphantly. To know peace is total: it is the moment after, when the surrenderer is complete, when there is no longer even the consciousness of surrender. Peace is at the centre and when it is attainded the voice issues forth in praise and benediction. Then the voice carries far and wide, to the outermost limits of the universe. Then it heals, because it brings light and the warmth of compassion."

"One feels that [in Knossos, c. 1500 B.C.] man […] was religious in the only way which is becoming to man, by making the most of everything that comes to hand, by extracting the utmost of life from every passing minute."

"I'm crazy enough to believe that the happiest man on earth is the man with the fewest needs."

"There ain't no such thing as civilization."

"If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms."

"[T]he aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."

"Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning."

"Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy: I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of it is not my concern."

"The real leader has no need to lead—he is content to point the way."

"It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd."

"All about us we see a world in revolt; but revolt is negative, a mere finishing-off process. In the midst of destruction we carry with us also our creation, our hopes, our strength, our urge to be fulfilled. The climate changes as the wheel turns, and what is true for the sidereal world is true for man. The last two thousand years have brought about a duality in man such as he never experienced before, and yet the man who dominates this whole period was one who stood for wholeness, one who proclaimed the Holy Ghost. No life in the whole history of man has been so misinterpreted, so woefully misunderstood as Christ's. If not a single Man has shown himself capable of following the example of Christ, and doubtless none ever will for we shall no longer have need of Christs, nevertheless this one profound example has altered our climate. Unconsciously we are moving into a new realm of being; what we have brought to perfection, in our zeal to escape the true reality, is a complete arsenal of destruction; when we have rid ourselves of the suicidal mania for a beyond we shall begin the life of here and now which is reality and which is sufficient unto itself. We shall have no need for art or religion because we shall be in ourselves a work of art. This is how I interpret realistically what Gutkind has set forth philosophically; this is the way in which man will overcome his broken state. If my statements are not precisely in accord with the text of Gutkind's thesis, I nevertheless am thoroughly in accord with Gutkind and his view of things. I have felt it my duty not only to set forth his doctrine, but to launch it, and in launching it to augment it, activate it. Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery. I am one man who can truly say that he has understood and acted upon this profound thought of Gutkind's—“the stupendous fact that we stand in the midst of reality will always be something far more wonderful than anything we do.""

"Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement."

"No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance."

"We do not talk—we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests."

"[T]he blind lead the blind, it's the democratic way."

"The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is, different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive."

"A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in...."

"We're creators by permission, by grace as it were. No one creates alone, of and by himself. An artist is an instrument that registers something already existent, something which belongs to the whole world, and which, if he is an artist, he is compelled to give back to the world."

"The man who is forever disturbed about the problems of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them."

"Through art then, one finally establishes contact with reality: that is the great discovery. Here all is play and invention; there is no solid foothold from which to launch the projectiles which will pierce the miasma of folly, ignorance and greed. The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful-thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another. The power which we long to possess, in order to establish the good, the true and the beautiful, would prove to be, if we could have it, but the means of destroying one another. It is fortunate that we are powerless."

"The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble."

"Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything."

"Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation.[…] The other eight are unimportant."

"In this age, which believes that there is a short-cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way, in the long run, is the easiest."

"A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum—of both books and money! But especially books, for books represent infinitely more than money. A book is not only a friend. It makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold."

"If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without."

"Many is the mirage I chased. Always I was overreaching myself. The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life. 'Experience! More experience!' I clamored. In a frantic effort to arrive at some kind of order, some tentative working program, I would sit down quietly now and then and spend long, long hours mapping out a plan of procedure. Plans, such as architects and engineers sweat over, were never my forte. But I could always visualize my dreams in a cosmogonic pattern. Though I could never formulate a plot I could balance and weigh opposing forces, characters, situations, events, distribute them in a sort of heavenly lay-out, always with plenty of space between, always with the certitude that there is no end, only worlds within worlds ad infinitum, and that wherever one left off one had created a world, a world finite, total, complete."

"My hunger and curiosity drive me forward in all directions at once."

"I am of the order whose purpose is not to teach the world a lesson but to explain that school is over."

"Often, when following the trail which meanders over the hills, I pull myself up in an effort to encompass the glory and the grandeur which envelops the whole horizon. Often, when the clouds pile up in the north and the sea is churned with white caps, I say to myself: "This is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa looked out on from the Peak of Darien, this is the face of the earth as the Creator intended it to look.""

"One's destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things."

"The most difficult thing to adjust to, apparently, is peace and contentment."

"It was here in Big Sur that I first learned to say 'amen.'"

"There's nothing wrong with the world. What's wrong is our way of looking at it."

"Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal."

"When a situation gets so bad that no solution seems possible there is left only murder or suicide. Or both. These failing, one becomes a buffoon."

"The Bible is full of miracles, and they have been accepted by thinking and unthinking individuals alike. But the miracle which every one is permitted to experience some time in his life, the miracle which demands no intervention, no intercessor, no supreme exertion of will, the miracle which is open to the fool and the coward as well as the hero and the saint, is love. Born of an instant, it lives eternally. If energy is imperishable, how much more so is love! Like energy, which is still a complete enigma, love is always there, always on tap. Man has never created an ounce of energy, nor did he create love. Love and energy have always been, always will be. Perhaps in essence they are one and the same. Why not? Perhaps this mysterious energy which is identified with the life of the universe, which is God in action, as some one has said, perhaps this secret, all-invasive force is but the manifestation of love."

"In the literature of utter desolation there is always and only one symbol (which may be expressed mathematically as well as spiritually) about which everything turns: minus love. For life can be lived, and usually is lived, on the minus side rather than the plus. Men may strive forever, and hopelessly, once they have elected to rule love out. That high unfathomable ache of emptiness into which all creation might be poured and still it would be emptiness, this aching for God, as it has been called, what is it if not a description of the soul's loveless state?"

"What I really hoped for, no doubt, was to come upon one of those lives which begin nowhere, which lead us through marshes and salt flats, trickling away, seemingly without plan, purpose or goal, and suddenly emerge, gushing like geysers, and never cease gushing, even in death."

"Things happen or they don't happen, that's all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because we've lost the habit of falling asleep."

"The frantic desire to live, to live at any cost, is not a result of the life rhythm in us, but of the death rhythm."

"I blush to think of our origins—our hands are steeped in blood and crime. And there is no letup to the slaughter and pillage."

"To be generous is to say Yes before the man even opens his mouth."

"I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must write and write and write."

"Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of any help except by being kind, generous, and patient."

"The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination."

"Words, sentences, ideas, no matter how subtle or ingenious, the maddest flights of poetry, the most profound dreams, the most hallucinating visions, are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible."

"The happiest peoples, it is said, are those which have no history. Those who have a history, those who have made history seem only to have emphasized through their accomplishments the eternality of struggle. These disappear too eventually, just as those who made no effort, who were content to merely live and enjoy."

"The battle is endless. It had no beginning, nor will it know an end. We who babble and froth at the mouth have been at it since eternity."

"Perhaps the artist is nothing more than the personification of this universal maladjustment, this universal disequilibrium."

"The whole damned universe has to be taken apart, brick by brick, and reconstructed."

"I am against revolutions because they always involve a return to the status quo."

"I am glad to be a maggot in the corpse which is the world."

"Everything remains unsettled forever, depend on it."

"Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself."

"The artist who becomes thoroughly aware consequently ceases to be one."

"Political leaders are never leaders. For leaders we have to look to the Awakeners! Lao Tse, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Milarepa, Gurdjiev, Krishnamurti."

"Emma Goldman. I had nothing but admiration for her. Those speeches she made on behalf of the working man, Jesus! She could inflame you, incite you to riot, [-] Goldman and Berkman, decided to assassinate the head of a big steel company, an industrial magnate named Frick. Well, they decided a gun would be the quickest and most efficient way, but they had the problem of not having enough money to buy one. So, Goldman thinks she'll have to prostitute herself to get the money. She dresses up and fixes herself up in a horrible way. She had no sense whatever in that regard. She stations herself on the street, waiting for customers, and all the while she's looking hideous, monstrous. The first man who approaches her is a gentleman, well dressed, well educated and the like. She tells him everything, all about her work, her beliefs, and even about the assassination plot. The man was completely intrigued with her stories, he wasn't at all interested in fucking her. He handed her a good sum of money [-] Needless to say, she had a profound effect on the lives of nearly everyone who came into contact with her. She was an exceptional figure."

"The Gnostics thought the planet Earth was a cosmic mistake. I too feel that way — I'm through with this Earth before I've even departed from it."

"One day, during one of their sessions, Gurdjieff tells Peters to look out the window and describe what he sees. 'An oak tree' the child answers. 'And what do you see on the oak tree?' 'Acorns' Peters replies. 'How many of these acorns do you suppose will become trees?' Fritz Peters is stumped, [-] 'Maybe five or six?' 'No' retorts Gurdjieff. 'Only one will become a tree, perhaps, none! Nature is always very giving, but it only gives possibility. It takes hard work and great effort to become a tree or a genuine man.'"

"I venerate van Gogh. He was a remarkable human being, a man who knew about love. His work reflects a spirit filled with light, even though his life was a tragedy in many ways."

"Vlaminck and Utrillo were very good friends, drinking buddies. One day they attend a funeral. They're walking behind the hearse in a procession, and they're having a great time conversing with one another. They are completely engrossed when suddenly one asks the other, 'Say, don't you smell something funny?' They look up and they're walking behind a garbage truck! They'd lost the hearse in the middle of their enthusiastic conversation."

"There was one artist who wrote as beautifully as he painted. That was Hokusai - He speaks for all artists, whether they are painters or not. [He wrote]: "I have been in love with painting ever since I became conscious of it at the age of six. I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was fifty, but really nothing I did before the age of seventy was of any value at all. At seventy three I have at last caught every aspect of nature-birds,fish,animals,insects,trees,grasses, all. When I am eighty I shall have developed still further. And I will really master the secrets of art at ninety. When I reach a hundred my work will be truly sublime, and my final goal will be attained around the age of one hundred and ten, when every line and dot I draw will be imbued with life.""

"The pygmies are one of the most cultured peoples on the face of the earth. They live a wonderful life, a life of purity. Not only are they busy and productive, they're happy and healthy as well. If we puny Americans had to live under their conditions, we'd perish in a day. Modern man has much to learn from the people he calls 'savages'. Before we are down to the last blade of grass it would be wise to study the life of the Pygmies. The secret of our own survival rests with them, the people who know how to make the most out of very little and find complete happiness with the bare essentials."

"I've spoken many times about the Japanese woman. I've praised her again and again. But I have to tell you that I think the Japanese man is the worst. The women are such delicate creatures and they're treated abominably by the men. The Japanese men are pigs - even worse than American men."

"More than anything the French have a profound knowledge of the ways of life. They possess a tolerance and an acceptance of the way things are. Problems are faced with intelligence, patience, and a sense of humanity. I have more respect for them than any other nationality on the face of the earth."

"As far as Bach is concerned, I never came close to liking him [-] My favourite composer is Scriabin -[and] his Fifth sonata, in my mind, the greatest piece of music ever written."

"Wagner wrote an opera titled Tristan and Yseult and in it there is a theme called Love Death theme. It is so sensual, so sexual that he was criticized for having introduced sex into music. And that was quite a few years before the appearance of Elvis Presley!"

"The man who doesn't respond to music, the man without music in his soul is not to be trusted. A man like that is cold and empty, empty to the core."

"Through it all I learned the value of being humble to the dust, reduced to ashes. Everyone should experience that. Before you can recognize you're somebody, you have to know you're nobody. [-] The butterfly was just a lowly worm in its beginning. The worm didn't live with the moment-to-moment expectation of sprouting wings and taking flight. He lived a useful and productive life, the life of a worm. And he had to die a worm in order to be born as an angel! The spinning of the cocoon is, in and of itself, remarkable. It is as wondrous as the emergence and first flight of the butterfly."

"I tell you, struggle is what is missing in the lives of most young people today. If they think I'm going to support them while they create great works of art, then they've missed the point of my work, of my life! In the process of becoming a writer or an artist one has to be willing to starve. Struggle is the most invaluable experience of all. Suffering seems to be the inevitable fate of the creative sensitive types. Poverty, disease, death, unrequited love affairs, and disappointments of every sort fan the flame of the artistic spirit. The greatest works of art were not created by spoiled brats. They were born for the most part out of a sense of despair, and if not despair then just plain hard work. Somewhere along the line the artist learns the art of transformation."

"The important thing was that when this story (""When Women Love Men"") came out no Puerto Rican woman had ever written about sex. My story is just a little story, and it's not Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, but I think I was trying to go in that direction."

""Spontaneity incarnate" is how Anaïs Nin once described Miller."

"Henry Miller came to me in the 70s. He said I didn’t ask to be born. He wrote in a complaining, American working class speech. He was from Williamsburg. It was ugly. It reminded me of Somerville, where I came from. He made it clear that an unprivileged American could be a writer and could have a lot to talk about. He switched constantly from speech to surrealism. That shift was important to me because an unstable self was what I had to use."

"People say, "Well, were you a feminist?" Well, I was writing those things in the mid-fifties. I was aware of a lot of things. I mean it's not as if I was so naïve. I was not naïve. I already knew that I couldn't stand Henry Miller, for instance. Goodness, I already knew that there was a literature that was not about me, sexually."

"(“Did you ever look for women writers, in particular, or look to find your own experience in your reading?”) No, not when I was very young. It's not so much that I looked for women writers, but I had sense enough to know that, like Henry Miller, he wasn't writing for me. That's as far as I went. I knew that these guys, even the Beats-I thought they were nice, nice to see all those boys, and nice to see all the sexual feelings, but I knew it really wasn't written for me at all. It's not so much that I looked for women writers, as that I understood certain much admired writers, like Burroughs, weren't talking to me. There was nothing to get from them. Though at the same time I did get stuff from Proust. That talked to me, but all those ballsy American heroes had nothing to say to me, though my friends thought they were just hot shit, excuse me."

"If we, in 1984, are asked to choose between, on the one hand, the Miller of Tropic of Cancer and ‘the first hundred pages of Black Spring’ and, on the other, the collected works of Auden, MacNeice and Spender, I doubt that many of us would go for old Henry. So it would appear that politically committed art can actually prove more durable than messages from the stomach of the fish."

"You notice that some of the stuff by men that I would call certainly pornographic, Henry Miller, for instance, is taken very seriously. It’s all so obvious. When women do it, it’s silly, when men do it, it’s serious."

"Henry Miller belonged in kind, though not in stature, to the great odd-man-out figures of literature like Blake, Whitman and Lawrence. Despite his incoherence as artist and philosopher he made a powerful impact on his time, thanks chiefly to the assurance and the sheer headlong energy of his work, expressed with equal vehemence in his protest against contemporary civilisation and in the affirmation of his own ego. ... Born in Brooklyn, Miller went to Cornell University and then – after a succession of odd jobs – to Paris where he launched himself on the ebb tide of American expatriate writing. He was already in his forties when his first and most famous novel, Tropic of Cancer, appeared in 1934. It was not until many years later, when it came out as a paperback, that the book was banned in the United States. This made it more celebrated than ever... There were clergymen who found him religious. There were critics who judged him to be some kind of sage and even saint, Ezra Pound admired him... As chief literary anarchist of his day, a kind of low priest celebrating the last rites of what he regarded as a doomed civilisation, it was not surprising that he became a hero of the Sixties beat generation..."

"Now she realized she had read two pages without taking in a single word. Henry Miller had that effect on her. He tended to ramble, and reading him, her mind did too."

"It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. And perhaps it is the case that the greatest artists live and die, the world and themselves alike ignorant what they possess. Who would not mourn that an ample palace, of surpassingly graceful architecture, fill'd with luxuries, and embellish'd with fine pictures and sculpture, should stand cold and still and vacant, and never be known or enjoy'd by its owner? Would such a fact as this cause your sadness? Then be sad. For there is a palace, to which the courts of the most sumptuous kings are but a frivolous patch, and, though it is always waiting for them, not one of its owners ever enters there with any genuine sense of its grandeur and glory. I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty."

"Talk not so much, then, young artist, of the great old masters, who but painted and chisell'd. Study not only their productions. There is a still higher school for him who would kindle his fire with coal from the altar of the loftiest and purest art. It is the school of all grand actions and grand virtues, of heroism, of the death of patriots and martyrs — of all the mighty deeds written in the pages of history — deeds of daring, and enthusiasm, devotion, and fortitude."

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. . . . The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured . . . . others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches . . . . and shall master all attachment."

"In our sun-down perambulations, of late, through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing "base", a certain game of ball ... Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms ... the game of ball is glorious."

"I have just this moment heard from the front — there is nothing yet of a movement, but each side is continually on the alert, expecting something to happen. O Mother, to think that we are to have here soon what I have seen so many times, the awful loads and trains and boatloads of poor, bloody, and pale and wounded young men again — for that is what we certainly will, and before very long. I see all the little signs, getting ready in the hospitals, etc.; it is dreadful when one thinks about it. I sometimes think over the sights I have myself seen: the arrival of the wounded after a battle, and the scenes on the field, too, and I can hardly believe my own recollections. What an awful thing war is! Mother, it seems not men but a lot of devils and butchers butchering each other."

"Looking over my scraps, I find I wrote the following during 1864. The happening to our America, abroad as well as at home, these years, is indeed most strange. The democratic republic has paid her to-day the terrible and resplendent compliment of the united wish of all the nations of the world that her union should be broken, her future cut off, and that she should be compell'd to descend to the level of kingdoms and empires ordinarily great. There is certainly not one government in Europe but is now watching the war in this country, with the ardent prayer that the United States may be effectually split, crippled, and dismember'd by it. There is not one but would help toward that dismemberment, if it dared. [...] Are we indignant? alarm'd? Do we feel jeopardized? No; help'd, braced, concentrated, rather. We are all too prone to wander from ourselves, to affect Europe, and watch her frowns and smiles. We need this hot lesson of general hatred, and henceforth must never forget it. Never again will we trust the moral sense nor abstract friendliness of a single government of the old world."

"We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress'd by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States has been fashion'd from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only — which is a very great mistake."

"Some people are so much sunlight to the square inch. I am still bathing in the cheer he radiated."

"There was a kind of labor agitator here today—a socialist, or something like that: young, a rather beautiful boy — full of enthusiasms: the finest type of the man in earnest about himself and about life. I was sorry to see him come: I am somehow afraid of agitators, though I believe in agitation: but I was more sorry to see him go than come. Some people are so much sunlight to the square inch. I am still bathing in the cheer he radiated. ... Cheer! cheer! Is there anything better in this world anywhere than cheer — just cheer? Any religion better? — any art? Just cheer!"

"I find I'm a good deal more of a socialist than I thought I was: maybe not technically, politically, so, but intrinsically, in my meanings."

"I said: "Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic!" He was hilarious: "That's beautiful: the hurrah game! well — it's our game: that's the chief fact in connection with it: America's game: has the snap, go fling, of the American atmosphere — belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.""

"If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur, it is certain that they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere — probably more than the rest of the world combined. Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations — many rare combinations. To have great poets, there must be great audiences too."

"I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love."

"I say the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion."

"I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion’s sake."

"None has begun to think how divine he himself is and how certain the future is."

"Nothing can happen more beautiful than death."

"I loafe and invite my soul."

"I have no mockings or arguments; I witness and wait."

"In the faces of men and women I see God."

"I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."

"I see Hermes, unsuspected, dying, well-beloved, saying to the people, "Do not weep for me, This is not my true country, I have lived banished from my true country—I now go back there, I return to the celestial sphere where every one goes in his turn.""

"Each of us inevitable; Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon the earth."

"The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman."

"In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed perfection."

"All, all for immortality, Love like the light silently wrapping all."

"Youth, large, lusty, loving—Youth, full of grace, force, fascination! Do you know that Old Age may come after you, with equal grace, force, fascination?"

"Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality, And the vast that is evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead."

"Thunder on! Stride on! Democracy. Strike with vengeful stroke!"

"O Banner! Not houses of peace are you, nor any nor all of their prosperity; if need be you shall have every one of those houses to destroy them; You thought not to destroy those valuable houses, standing fast, full of comfort, built with money; May they stand fast then? Not an hour, unless you, above them and all, stand fast."

"Over all the sky—the sky! far, far out of reach, studded with the eternal stars."

"Give me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling!"

"Lo! the moon ascending! Up from the East, the silvery round moon; Beautiful over the house-tops, ghastly, phantom moon; Immense and silent moon."

"Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost; That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again and ever again, this soiled world."

"When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed, And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night, I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring."

"Come lovely and soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later, delicate death."

"Praised be the fathomless universe For life and joy and for objects and knowledge curious; And for love, sweet love—But praise! O praise and praise For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death."

"O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done! The ship has weathered every wrack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting."

"Liberty is to be subserved, whatever occurs."

"Peace is always beautiful."

"What do you suppose will satisfy the soul except to walk free and own no superior?"

"To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle."

"I was thinking the day most splendid, till I saw what the not-day exhibited; I was thinking this globe enough, till there sprang out so noiseless around me myriads of other globes."

"I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death."

"I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!"

"The paths to the house I seek to make, But leave to those to come the house itself."

"Society waits unformed and is between things ended and things begun."

"Now obey thy cherished secret wish, Embrace thy friends—leave all in order; To port and hawser's tie no more returning, Depart upon thy endless cruise, old Sailor!"

"I announce the great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate, fully armed; I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold, And I announce an end that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation."

"Be curious, not judgmental."

"I see great things in baseball, It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism, tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set, repair those losses and be a blessing to us."

"Yes, Mexico must be thoroughly chastised! Let our arms now be carried with a spirit which shall teach the world that, while we are not forward for a quarrel, American knows how to crush, as well as expand!"

"Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you."

"Native American literature should be important to Americans not as a curio, an artifact of the American past that has little pertinence to an American present or future, but rather as a major tradition that informs American writers ranging from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner to Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, and Judy Grahn."

"I rank Muriel Rukeyser with Walt Whitman, the essential American poet, democratic at the level of hope."

"When I was young I once found a book in a Dutch translation, 'The leaves of Grass'. It was the first time a book touched me by its feeling of freedom and open spaces, the way the poet spoke of the ocean by describing a drop of water in his hand. Walt Whitman was offering the world an open hand (now we call it democracy) and my 'Monument for Walt Whitman' became this open hand with mirrors, so you can see inside yourself."

"Incompossible, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both—as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man."

"the contributions of people whom we may now identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender are integral and central to how we conceptualize our national history. Without the work of social activists, thinkers, writers, and artists such as We'Wha, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Martha "Calamity" Jane Cannary Burke, Edith Guerrier, Countee Cullen, Ethel Waters, Bayard Rustin, Roy Cohn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cherrie Moraga, and Lily Tomlin, we would not have the country that we have today."

"Whitman...a man full-blooded and brotherly, unselfconscious in his democracy and genuinely at ease with all kinds and classes."

"The populist poet of Jacksonian democracy, Walt Whitman, sang the song of manhood and the Anglo-American super race that had been steeled through empire. As an enthusiastic supporter of the US war against Mexico in 1846, Whitman proposed the stationing of sixty thousand US troops in Mexico in order to establish a regime change there "whose efficiency and permanency shall be guaranteed by the United States. This will bring out enterprise, open the way for manufacturers and commerce, into which the immense dead capital of the country [Mexico] will find its way."2 Whitman explicitly grounded this prescription in racism: "The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history.... A superior grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out." The whole world would benefit from US expansion: "We pant to see our country and its rule far-reaching. What has miserable, inefficient Mexico... to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?" In September 1846, when General Zachary Taylor's troops captured Monterrey, Whitman hailed it as "another clinching proof of the indomitable energy of the Anglo-Saxon character" Whitman's sentiments reflected the established US origin myth that had the frontier settlers replacing the Native peoples as historical destiny, adding his own theoretical twist of what would later be called social Darwinism."

"Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists. Although some of the writers, like Melville and Longfellow, paid little attention to the war, most of the others either fiercely supported it or opposed it. Whitman, a supporter, was also enamored of the violent Indian- and Mexican-killing Texas Rangers. Whitman saw the war as bolstering US self-respect and believed that a "true American" would be unable to resist "this pride in our victorious armies.""

"I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "LEAVES OF GRASS." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging..."

"The whole world has given heroic figures to humanity, who in the face of persecution and obloquy have lived and fought for their right and the right of mankind to free and unstinted expression. America has the distinction of having contributed a large quota of native-born children who have most assuredly not lagged behind. Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Voltairine de Cleyre...Moses Harman...Horace Traubel...and quite an array of other brave souls have expressed themselves in keeping with their vision of a new social order based on freedom from every form of coercion. True, the price they had to pay was high. They were deprived of most of the comforts society offers to ability and talent, but denies when they will not be subservient. But whatever the price, their lives were enriched beyond the common lot."

"I had started reading Marx and Lenin, but at that point I think Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau had more effect on me. What I responded to in my readings were emotional rather than theoretical questions. I was developing a hatred of the brutality of the existing economic system, a hatred of the impersonal degradation of human beings. That's what moved me as a teenager, and stayed with me."

"I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession."

"One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world."

"Walt Whitman; I love his poetry."

"I know the formal element in Walt Whitman's poetry found and enormous echo throughout the world. Yet Walt Whitman's significance lies elsewhere. He combined the contemplation of nature and of civilization which are apparently either contradictory, into a single intoxicating vision of life, because he always had sight of the transitoriness of all phenomena. He said: "Living is the little that is left over from dying." so he gave his whole heart to every leaf of grass. I admire in him the reconciliation of art and nature. When the war between the Northern and Southern States in America, which first really set in motion the power of our present machine world, first broke out, Walt Whitman became a medical orderly. He did what all of us ought to do, particularly today. He helped the weak, the sick and the defeated. He was a Christian and–with a close affinity to us Jews–he was therefore an important measure of the status and worth of humanity."

"I mean to carry on in the tradition of Walt Whitman. Whitman says, "I sing the body electric" and "I sing the body from top to toe." He writes about his goal of celebrating the modern man as he calls it, and he sings the American self."

"I felt some really exciting things were happening with the language in the Sixties because people were finding that vocabulary for psychedelic states or visions or social action. But as I was working with that language, I saw too how it had its roots a hundred years ago in Whitman. So if it goes back a hundred years to Whitman, then it goes back thirty more to Poe. I feel very much in that tradition, showing people how 1960 was using language of the 1860s. Because we don't remember. Walt Whitman said, "Look to the East, that's also your motherland." He already had that idea that our myths are not just from Europe, but from Asia. So I'm saying, "Look at Asia," because we already know that we come from Europe. For a long time when we say classical, we meant Greek and Roman. And I'm saying, "Look, there's more classics, more.""

"I like the freedom that Walt Whitman was using to play with and shape the American language. Especially in writing Tripmaster Monkey-I just lifted lines from Leaves of Grass. You would think they were modern Sixties' slang-"Trippers and Askers" and "Linguists and Contenders Surround Me"-all of that-"Song of the Open Road," "Song of Occupations"-I just took those for title headings for my book. I like the rhythm of his language and the freedom and the wildness of it. It's so American. And also his vision of a new kind of human being that was going to be formed in this country-although he never specifically said Chinese-ethnic Chinese also I'd like to think he meant all kinds of people. And also I love that throughout Leaves of Grass he always says "men and women," "male and female." He's so different from other writers of his time, and even of this time. Even a hundred years ago he always included women and he always used [those phrases], "men and women," "male and female.""

"Behold great Whitman, whose licentious line Delights the rake, and warms the souls of swine; Whose fever'd fancy shuns the measur'd pace, And copies Ovid's filth without his grace. In his rough brain a genius might have grown, Had he not sought to play the brute alone; But void of shame, he let his wit run wild, And liv'd and wrote as Adam's bestial child. Averse to culture, strange to humankind, He never knew the pleasures of the mind. Scorning the pure, the delicate, the clean, His joys were sordid, and his morals mean. Thro' his gross thoughts a native vigour ran, From which he deem'd himself the perfect man: But want of decency his rank decreas'd, And sunk him to the level of the beast. Would that his Muse had dy'd before her birth, Nor spread such foul corruption o'er the earth."

"Walt was always working on the same book/First edition did not/have his name on cover/He reviewed himself in newspapers anonymously/quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson/without permission/on the spine/Emerson was not thrilled/Take a breath/Full breath/That's what I call a poet"

"Anyone can visit Walt Whitman's birthing corner on/Long Island./The guide points and says, There, right there, he was/born./Some visitors can't move on quickly/to the next room./They are hypnotized./What if Walt had never left this corner or stepped out/into the streets/to do and say all he did?/Then who would we be?"

"When Whitman in Song of Myself wrote "Camerado, this is no book. Who touches this touches a man, and "What I assume you shall assume," he articulated an abiding impulse latent within all poetry. The women's poetry movement today is a carrier of that same impulse and makes it possible for us to "assume" more than we did before."

"I read a lot. In poetry, I liked W. H. Auden more than anyone. I loved British writers and the novels I grew up with, Twain, Dickens, and so on. I was not influenced say by Walt Whitman or anyone like that. His freedom was not my freedom, and so it didn’t affect me."

"I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman — I have detested you long enough."

"Whitman’s masterpiece, his whole vision, is exactly about this: life as a quest for truth, love, beauty, goodness, and freedom; life as the art of becoming human through the cultivation of the human soul."

"Whitman is a "bad influence"; that is, he cannot be imitated."

"Whitman to me is the most fascinating of American poets. Whitman started to write the great poetry from scratch after he had written all that junk for newspapers, the sentimental lyrical poems. All of a sudden he wrote Leaves of Grass. When I was teaching at the University of Nebraska, my friend James Miller was chairman of the English Department. He wrote the first book attempting to make a parallel between the structure of Leaves of Grass and the steps of the mystical experience as in St. John of the Cross. I was completely bowled over by this, not having been able to explain how Whitman came to write “Song of Myself,” which is unlike anything not only in American literature, but unique in all the world. The parallels to it are mystical literature. Miller tried to show that there was actual evidence for this kind of experience, which evidently happens at a particular moment in someone's life. ... When I saw the negative reaction to Whitman with the great ruling critics of the time, I couldn't believe it. Eliot never really gave up hammering away on Whitman, neither did Pound. Although Pound makes little concessions. Whitman, you know, didn't have any influence in this country until Allen Ginsberg came along."

"I would think Walt Whitman probably had more influence on my whole poetic thinking than anybody, but I never dreamed of trying to write in the Whitman manner."

"With Whitman, the exhilarations are specifically aimed at the pioneer; I don't see any obstructions. I don't see the Indians coming in the opposite direction. I don't see Indian massacres. I don't see brutalities, scalpings, and burning and torturing. It's a sanitized version of infinite wheat fields. I think a great poet has a deeper sense of evil, a wickedness of malice and malignity."

"When I read the poetry of Walt Whitman, I could understand why he answered the question, “Do I contradict myself?" with "Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.""

"So, ungentle reader, (as you and I value what we should ashamed—after witnessing a few minor circus-marvels—to call our "lives,") let us never be fooled into taking seriously that perfectly superficial distinction which is vulgarly drawn between the circus-show and "art" or "the arts." Let us not forget that every authentic "work of art" is in and of itself alive and that, however "the arts" may differ among themselves, their common function is the expression of that supreme alive-ness which is known as "beauty." This being so, our three ring circus is art—for to contend that the spectacle in question is not an authentic manifestation of "beauty" is as childish, as to dismiss the circus on the ground that it is "childish," is idiotic."

"My theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. "Would you hit a woman with a child?— No, I'd hit her with a brick." Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement."

"open your thighs to fate and(if you can withholding nothing)World, conceive a man"

"Simple people, people who don't exist, prefer things which don't exist,simple things. "Good" and "bad" are simple things. You bomb me = "bad." I bomb you = "good." Simple people(who,incidentally,run this socalled world)know this(they know everything)whereas complex people—people who feel something—are very,very ignorant and really don't know anything."

"Very luckily for you and me,the uncivilized sun mysteriously shines on "good" and "bad" alike. He is an artist."

"Art is a mystery. A mystery is something immeasurable.In so far as every child and woman and man may be immeasurable, art is the mystery of every man and woman and child. In so far as a human being is an artist, skies and mountains and oceans and thunderbolts and butterflies are immeasurable; and art is every mystery of nature. Nothing measurable can be alive; nothing which is not alive can be art; nothing which cannot be art is true: and everything untrue doesn't matter a very good God damn..."

"Why do you paint? For exactly the same reason I breathe. That's not an answer. There isn't any answer. How long hasn't there been any answer? As long as I can remember. And how long have you written? As long as I can remember. I mean poetry. So do I."

"Your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy. Easy? Of course—you paint flowers and girls and sunsets; things that everybody understands. I never met him. Who? Everybody. Did you ever hear of nonrepresentational painting? I am. Pardon me? I am a painter, and painting is nonrepresentational. Not all painting. No: housepainting is representational. And what does a housepainter represent? Ten dollars an hour. In other words, you don't want to be serious— It takes two to be serious."

"when you confuse art with propaganda,you confuse an act of God with something which can be turned on and off like the hot water faucet. If "God" means nothing to you(or less than nothing)I'll cheerfully substitute one of your own favorite words,"freedom". You confuse freedom—the only freedom—with absolute tyranny... all over this socalled world,hundreds of millions of servile and insolent inhuman unbeings are busily unrolling in the enlightenment of propaganda."

"There are still a few erect human beings in the socalled world. Proudly and humbly,I say to these human beings: "O my fellow citizens,many an honest man believes a lie. Though you are as honest as the day, fear and hate the liar. Fear and hate him when he should be feared and hated:now. Fear and hate him were he should be feared and hated:in yourselves. "Do not hate and fear the artist in yourselves,my fellow citizens. Honour him and love him. Love him truly— do not try to possess him. Trust him as nobly as you trust tomorrow. "Only the artist in yourselves is more truthful than the night.""

"Life,for eternal us,is now"

"love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star"

"milly befriended a stranded star whose rays five languid fingers were;and molly was chased by a horrible thing which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and may came home with a smooth round stone as small as a world and as large as alone for whatever we lose (like a you or a me) it's always ourselves we find in the sea"

"that strictly(and how)scienti fic land of supernod where freedom is compulsory and only man is god."

"while in an earthless hour my fond soul seriously yearns beyond this fern of sunset frond on frond opening in a rare Slowness of gloried air..."

"All in green went my love riding on a great horse of gold into the silver dawn."

"it's spring when the world is puddle-wonderful"

"Buffalo Bill's defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeons— justlikethat Jesus he was a handsome man and what i want to know is how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death"

"the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds"

"this is the garden: colours come and go, frail azures fluttering from night’s outer wing strong silent greens serenely lingering, absolute lights like baths of golden snow."

"among the slow deep trees perpetual of sleep some silver-fingered fountain steals the world."

"when the proficient poison sure sleep bereaves us of our slow tranquillitiesand He without Whose favour nothing is (being of men called Love) upward doth leap from the mute hugeness of depriving deep,with thunder of those hungering wings of His,into the lucent and large signories —i shall not smile beloved;i shall not weep"

"i like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more. i like your body. i like what it does, i like its hows."

"who knows if the moon's a balloon, coming out of a keen city in the sky—filled with pretty people?"

"There are certain things in which one is unable to believe for the simple reason that he never ceases to feel them. Things of this sort — things which are always inside of us and in fact are us and which consequently will not be pushed off or away where we can begin thinking about them — are no longer things; they, and the us which they are, equals A Verb; an IS."

"a man who had fallen among thieves lay by the roadside on his back dressed in fifteenthrate ideas wearing a round jeer for a hat"

""next to of course god america i love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh say can you see by the dawn's early my country 'tis of centuries come and go and are no more what of it we should worry in every language even deafanddumb thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry by jingo by gee by gosh by gum why talk of beauty what could be more beaut- iful than these heroic happy dead who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter they did not stop to think they died instead then shall the voices of liberty be mute?" He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water"

"wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate than wisdom"

"life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis"

"lady through whose profound and fragile lips the sweet small clumsy feet of April cameinto the ragged meadow of my soul."

"Here life is, moves; faintly. A wrist. The faint throb of blood, precise, miraculous... And they talk of dying! The blood delicately descending and ascending: making an arm. Being an arm. The warm flesh, the dim slender flesh filled with life, slenderer than a miracle, frailer... These are the shoulders through which fell the world. The dangerous shoulders of Eve, in god's entire garden newly strolling."

"A distinct throat. Which breathes. A head: small, smaller than a flower. With eyes and with lips. Lips more slender than light; a smile how carefully and slowly made, a smile made entirely of dream. Eyes deeper than Spring. Eyes darker than Spring, more new... These, these are the further miracles... the breasts. Thighs. The All which is beyond comprehension — the All which is perpetually discovered, yet undiscovered: sexual, sweet, Alive!"

"It may take two people to make a really beautiful mistake"

"the only man woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors "is dead" beautiful Warren Gamaliel Harding "is" dead he's "dead""

"somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence. in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near your slightest look easily will unclose me though i have closed myself as fingers, you always open petal by petal myself as Spring opens (touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose or if it be your wish to close me, i and my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly as the heart of this flower imagines the snow carefully everywhere descending; nothing we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility: whose texture compels me with the colour of its countries rendering death and forever with each breathing"

"(i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands"

"Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question."

"I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance"

"King Christ, this world is all aleak; and lifepreservers there are none: and waves which only He may walk Who dares to call Himself a man."

"ye!the godless are the dull and the dull are the damned"

"anyone lived in a pretty how town (with up so floating many bells down) spring summer autumn winter he sang his didn’t he danced his did."

"my father moved through dooms of love through sames of am through haves of give singing each morning out of each night my father moved through depths of height"

"and nothing quite so least as truth —i say though hate were why men breathe— because my father lived his soul love is the whole and more than all"

"love is the every only god"

"love is more thicker than forget ... it is more sane and sunly and more it cannot die than all the sky which only is higher than the sky"

"measureless our pure living complete love whose doom is beauty and its fate to grow"

"on forever's very now we stand"

"a politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man"

"plato told him:he couldn't believe it(jesustold him;he wouldn't believe itlaotsze certainly told him,and general (yes mam) sherman; and even (believe it or not)you told him:i told him;we told him (he didn't believe it,no sir)"

"pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness"

"We doctors know a hopeless case if — listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go"

"—when skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man"

"what if a dawn of a doom of a dream bites this universe in two, peels forever out of it's grave and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?"

"when god decided to invent everything he took one breath bigger than a circustent and everything beganwhen man determined to destroy himself he picked the was of shall and finding only why smashed it into because"

"no sunbeam ever lies"

"true wars are never won"

"'and liars kill their kind but' her,my 'love creates love only' our"

"nothing false and possible is love (who's imagined, therefore limitless) love's to giving as to keeping's give; as yes is to if, love is to yes"

"true lovers in each happening of their hearts live longer than all which and every who"

"yes is a pleasant country... love is a deeper season than reason"

"—tommorow is our permanent address and there they'll scarcely find us(if they do, we'll move away still further:into now"

"all ignorance toboggans into know and trudges up to ignorance again"

"nothing except the impossible shall occur"

"What concerns me fundamentaly is a meteoric burlesk melodrama, born of the immemorial adage love will find a way."

"A humbly poetic, gently clownlike, supremely innocent, and illimitably affectionate creature (slightly resembling a child's drawing of a cat, but gifted with the secret grace and obvious clumsiness of a penguin on terra firma) who is never so happy as when egoist-mouse, thwarting altruist-dog, hits her in the head with a brick. Dog hates mouse and worships "cat", mouse despises "cat" and hates dog, "cat" hates no one and loves mouse."

"If you're a twofisted, spineless progressive (a mighty fashionable stance nowadays) Offissa Pupp, who forcefully asserts the will of socalled society, becomes a cosmic angel; while Ignatz Mouse, who forcefully defies society's socalled will by asserting his authentic own, becomes a demon of anarchy and a fiend of chaos. But if—whisper it—you're a 100% hidebound reactionary, the foot's in the other shoe. Ignatz Mouse then stands forth as a hero, pluckily struggling to keep the flag of free will flying; while Offissa Pupp assumes the monstrous mien of a Goliath, satanically bullying a tiny but indomitable David. Well, let's flip the coin—so: and lo! Offissa Pupp comes up. That makes Ignatz Mouse "tails." Now we have a hero whose heart has gone to his head and a villain whose head has gone to his heart."

"This hero and villain no more understand Krazy Kat than the mythical denizens of a two dimensional realm understand some three dimensional intruder. The world of Offissa Pupp and Ignatz Mouse is a knowledgeable power-world, in terms of which our unknowledgeable heroine is powerlessness personified. The sensical law of this world is might makes right; the nonsensical law of our heroine is love conquers all. To put the oak in the acorn: Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Pupp (each completely convinced that his own particular brand of might makes right) are simple-minded—Krazy isn't—therefore, to Offissa Pupp and Ignatz Mouse, Krazy is. But if both our hero and our villain don't and can't understand our heroine, each of them can and each of them does misunderstand her differently. To our softhearted altruist, she is the adorably helpless incarnation of saintliness. To our hardhearted egoist, she is the puzzlingly indestructible embodiment of idiocy. The benevolent overdog sees her as an inspired weakling. The malevolent undermouse views her as a born target. Meanwhile Krazy Kat, through this double misunderstanding, fulfills her joyous destiny."

"out of the mountain of his soul comes a keen pure silence"

"blossoming are people... all the earth has turned to sky ...and i am you are i am we"

"i feel that(false and true are merely to know) Love only has ever been,is,and will ever be,So"

"i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes"

"i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay great happening illimitably earth"

"how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any — lifted from the no of all nothing — human merely being doubt unimaginable You?"

"now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened"

"—the great my darling happens to be that love are in we, that love are in we"

"completely dare be beautiful"

"more each particular person is(my love) alive than every world can understand and now you are and i am now and we're a mystery that will never happen again, a miracle which has never happened before— and shining this our now must come to then"

"poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality....poetry is being, not doing....if poetry is your goal, you've got to forget all about punishments and all about rewards and all about selfstyled obligations and duties and responsibilities"

"The one...thing which mattered about any poem (so ran my second poetic period's credo) was what the poem said; it's socalled meaning ... Thus it will be seen that, by the year 1900, one growing American boy had reached exactly that stage of "intellectual development" beyond which every ungrowing Marxist adult of today is strictly forbidden ... ever to pass."

"Writing, I feel, is an art; and artists, I feel, are human beings. As a human being stands, so a human being is: not that some human beings aren't acrobats, while others—but why anticipate Him and Santa Claus?"

"concerning this selfstyled world's greatest and most generous literary figure: who had just arrived in our nation's capitol, attired in half a GI uniform and ready to be hanged as a traitor by the only country which ever made even a pretense of fighting for freedom of speech Re Ezra Pound — poetry happens to be an art;and artists happen to be human beings."

"An artist doesn't live in some geographical abstraction,superimposed on a part of this beautiful earth by the nonimagination of unanimals and dedicated to the proposition that massacre is a social virtue because murder is an individual vice. Nor does an artist live in some soi-disant world,nor does he live in some so-called universe,nor does he live in any number of "worlds" or in any number of "universes." As for a few trifling delusions like the "past" and "present" and "future" of quote mankind unquote,they may be big enough for a couple of billion supermechanized submorons but they're much too small for one human being."

"Every artist's strictly illimitable country is himself.An artist who plays that country false has committed suicide;and even a good lawyer cannot kill the dead. But a human being who's true to himself — whoever himself may be — is immortal;and all the atomic bombs of all the antiartists in spacetime will never civilize immortality."

"the courage to receive time's mightiest dream"

"no evil is so worse than worst you fall in hate with love —human one mortally immortal i can turn immense all time's because to why"

"though mankind persuades itself that every weed's a rose,roses(you feel certain) will only smile"

"seeming's enough for slaves of space and time —ours is the now and here of freedom. Come"

"Time's a strange fellow; more he gives than takes (and he takes all)"

"a million thousand hundred nothings seem —we are himself's own self;his very him"

"exists no miracle mightier than this:to feel"

"dreamtree,truthtree tree of jubilee:with aeons of (trivial merely)existence,all when may not measure a now of your treasure"

"each ignorant gladness —unteaches what despair preaches"

"unlove's the heavenless hell and the homeless home"

"lovers alone wear sunlight"

"The whole truth... sings only —and all lovers are the song"

"it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you"

"Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel...the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."

"nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we are not poets."

"my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die. Does this sound dismal? It isn't. It's the most wonderful life on earth. Or so I feel."

"seeker of truth follow no path all paths lead where truth is here"

"it's love by whom (my beautiful friend) the gift to live is without until: ...love was and shall be this only truth (a dream of a deed, born not to die)"

"it's so damn sweet when Anybody— ...makes you feel ...for once (imag -ine) You"

"because it's Spring thingS dare to do people"

"a great man is gone.Tall as the truth was who; and wore his ... life like a ... sky."

"they flock and they flee through the thunder of seem though the stars in their silence say Be"

"the cunning the craven ... they live for until though the sun in his heaven says Now"

"they work and they pray and they bow to a must though the earth in her splendor says May"

"without any doubt he was whatever(first and last) most people fear most: a mystery for which iv'e no word except alive"

"Mostpeople have been heard screaming for international measures that render hell rational —i thank heaven somebody's crazy enough to give me a daisy"

"we sans love equals mob"

"unbeingdead isn't beingalive"

"all which isn't singing is mere talking ... and all talking's to oneself alone but the very song of(as mountains feel and lovers)singing is silence"

"hugest whole creation may be less incalculable than a single kiss"

"now I lay me down to dream of(nothing i or any somebody or you can begin to begin to imagine) something which nobody may keep."

"the axis of the universe —love"

"E. E. Cummings is not a writer; he is just a phase that other writers go through."

"cummings was doing the same thing: getting into words, rolling around in them. As a child, I used to charm myself with words."

"I admire E.E. Cummings's musicality, less for his visual-only poems, not at all for his occasional anti-Semitism."

"If the light were not in your eyes, dear Mr. Brooks, you would understand better how happy your little Helen was when her teacher explained to her that the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched but just felt in the heart."

"One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar."

"I want to say to those who are trying to learn to speak and those who are teaching them: Be of good cheer. Do not think of to-day's failures, but of the success that may come to-morrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere, and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles — a delight in climbing rugged paths, which you would perhaps never know if you did not sometime slip backward — if the road was always smooth and pleasant. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost. Sometime, somewhere, somehow we shall find that which we seek. We shall speak, yes, and sing, too, as God intended we should speak and sing."

"The only real blind person at Christmas-time is he who has not Christmas in his heart. We sightless children had the best of eyes that day in our hearts and in our finger-tips. We were glad from the child's necessity of being happy. The blind who have outgrown the child's perpetual joy can be children again on Christmas Day and celebrate in the midst of them who pipe and dance and sing a new song!"

"The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction."

"We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond the senses."

"The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important, than those of blindness. Deafness is a much worse misfortune. For it means the loss of the most vital stimulus — the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of man."

"Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.... You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice?"

"Some years ago I met a gentleman who was introduced to me as Mr. McKelway, editor of the Brooklyn Eagle ... At the time the compliments that he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for Socialism he reminds me and the public that I am deaf and blind and especially liable to error.... The Eagle and I are at war. When it fights back, let it fight fair.... It is not fair fighting or good argument to remind me and others that I cannot see or hear."

"The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision."

"Our puny sentimentalism has caused us to forget that a human life is sacred only when it may be of some use to itself and to the world."

"It is the possibility of happiness, intelligence and power that give life its sanctity, and they are absent in the case of a poor, misshapen, paralyzed, unthinking creature."

"Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought. Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder. Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings. Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction."

"Self-culture has been loudly and boastfully proclaimed as sufficient for all our ideals of perfection. But if we listen to the best men and women everywhere ... they will say that science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all — the apathy of human beings."

"When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us."

"Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain."

"Many persons have a wrong of idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose."

"No doubt the reason is that character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved."

"Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold."

"Since my seventeenth year, I have tried to live according to the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg. By "church" he did not mean an ecclesiastical organization, but a spiritual fellowship of thoughtful men and women who spend their lives for a service to mankind that outlasts them. He called it a civilization that was to be born of a healthy, universal religion—goodwill, mutual understanding, service from each to all, regardless of dogma or ritual."

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."

"I do not want the peace that passeth understanding. I want the understanding which bringeth peace."

"Some people do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions; and conclusions are not always pleasant. They are a thorn in the spirit. But I consider it a priceless gift and a deep responsibility to think."

"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much."

"Tyranny cannot defeat the power of ideas."

"The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrasts between the two lives which it connects. It was the third of March, 1887, three months before I was seven years old."

"Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour was. "Light! give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour."

"We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Some one was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away. I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me."

"I had now the key to all language, and I was eager to learn to use it. Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process. But whatever the process, the result is wonderful. Gradually from naming an object we advance step by step until we have traversed the vast distance between our first stammered syllable and the sweep of thought in a line of Shakespeare."

"I remember the morning that I first asked the meaning of the word, "love." This was before I knew many words. I had found a few early violets in the garden and brought them to my teacher. She tried to kiss me: but at that time I did not like to have any one kiss me except my mother. Miss Sullivan put her arm gently round me and spelled into my hand, "I love Helen." "What is love?" I asked. She drew me closer to her and said, "It is here," pointing to my heart, whose beats I was conscious of for the first time. Her words puzzled me very much because I did not then understand anything unless I touched it. I smelt the violets in her hand and asked, half in words, half in signs, a question which meant, "Is love the sweetness of flowers?" "No," said my teacher. Again I thought. The warm sun was shining on us. "Is this not love?" I asked, pointing in the direction from which the heat came. "Is this not love?" It seemed to me that there could be nothing more beautiful than the sun, whose warmth makes all things grow. But Miss Sullivan shook her head, and I was greatly puzzled and disappointed. I thought it strange that my teacher could not show me love."

"Miss Sullivan touched my forehead and spelled with decided emphasis, "Think." In a flash I knew that the word was the name of the process that was going on in my head. This was my first conscious perception of an abstract idea. For a long time I was still ... trying to find a meaning for "love" in the light of this new idea. The sun had been under a cloud all day, and there had been brief showers; but suddenly the sun broke forth in all its southern splendour. Again I asked my teacher, "Is this not love?" "Love is something like the clouds that were in the sky before the sun came out," she replied. Then in simpler words than these, which at that time I could not have understood, she explained: "You cannot touch the clouds, you know; but you feel the rain and know how glad the flowers and the thirsty earth are to have it after a hot day. You cannot touch love either; but you feel the sweetness that it pours into everything. Without love you would not be happy or want to play." The beautiful truth burst upon my mind — I felt that there were invisible lines stretched between my spirit and the spirits of others."

"Now, so far as I can judge, self-love is the root of all evil"

"Virgil is serene and lovely like a marble Apollo in the moonlight; Homer is a beautiful, animated youth in the full sunlight with the wind in his hair."

"I began to read the Bible long before I could understand it. Now it seems strange to me that there should have been a time when my spirit was deaf to its wondrous harmonies ... But how shall I speak of the glories I have since discovered in the Bible? For years I have read it with an ever-broadening sense of joy and inspiration; and I love it as I love no other book."

"Ruth is so loyal and gentle-hearted, we cannot help loving her, as she stands with the reapers amid the waving corn. Her beautiful, unselfish spirit shines out like a bright star in the night of a dark and cruel age. Love like Ruth's, love which can rise above conflicting creeds and deep-seated racial prejudices, is hard to find in all the world."

"The Bible gives me a deep, comforting sense that "things seen are temporal and things unseen are eternal.""

"I do not remember a time since I have been capable of loving books that I have not loved Shakespeare."

"I read "King Lear" soon after "Macbeth," and I shall never forget the feeling of horror when I came to the scene in which Gloster's eyes are put out. Anger seized me, my fingers refused to move, I sat rigid for one long moment, the blood throbbing in my temples, and all the hatred that a child can feel concentrated in my heart."

"There are moments when I feel that the Shylocks, the Judases, and even the Devil, are broken spokes in the great wheel of good which shall in due time be made whole."

"Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their "large loves and heavenly charities.""

"If it is true that the violin is the most perfect of musical instruments, then Greek is the violin of human thought."

"Toleration ... is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle."

"It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui."

"No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right."

"I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty and joy to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. It is my service to think how I can best fulfil the demands that each day makes upon me, and to rejoice that others can do what I cannot. Green, the historian,[Life and Letters of John Richard Green. Edited by Leslie Stephen.] tells us that the world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker; and that thought alone suffices to guide me in this dark world and wide." p. 21"

"It is curious to observe what different ideals of happiness people cherish, and in what singular places they look for this well-spring of their life. Many look for it in the hoarding of riches, some in the pride of power, and others in the achievements of art and literature; a few seek it in the exploration of their own minds, or in search for knowledge."

"Most people measure their happiness in terms of physical pleasure and material possession. Could they win some visible goal which they have set on the horizon, how happy they would be! Lacking this gift or that circumstance, they would be miserable. If happiness is to be so measured, I who cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a corner with folded hands and weep. If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life, — if, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing."

"Once I knew the depth where no hope was, and darkness lay on the face of all things. Then love came and set my soul free. Once I knew only darkness and stillness. Now I know hope and joy. Once I fretted and beat myself against the wall that shut me in. Now I rejoice in the consciousness that I can think, act and attain heaven. My life was without past or future; death, the pessimist would say, "a consummation devoutly to be wished." But a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living. Night fled before the day of thought, and love and joy and hope came up in a passion of obedience to knowledge. Can anyone who has escaped such captivity, who has felt the thrill and glory of freedom, be a pessimist?"

"It is a mistake always to contemplate the good and ignore the evil, because by making people neglectful it lets in disaster. There is a dangerous optimism of ignorance and indifference."

"It lets us into the soul of things and teaches us that although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail. I try to increase the power God has given me to see the best in everything and every one, and make that Best a part of my life."

"I demand that the world be good, and lo, it obeys. I proclaim the world good, and facts range themselves to prove my proclamation overwhelmingly true."

"To what is good I open the doors of my being, and jealously shut them against what is bad. Such is the force of this beautiful and wilful conviction, it carries itself in the face of all opposition. I am never discouraged by absence of good. I never can be argued into hopelessness."

"I, too, can work, and because I love to labor with my head and my hands, I am an optimist in spite of all. I used to think I should be thwarted in my desire to do something useful. But I have found out that though the ways in which I can make myself useful are few, yet the work open to me is endless."

"I trust, and nothing that happens disturbs my trust."

"Optimism, then, is a fact within my own heart. But as I look out upon life, my heart meets no contradiction. The outward world justifies my inward universe of good."

"But in a little measure my small voice of individual experience does join in the declaration of philosophy that the good is the only world, and that world is a world of spirit. It is also a universe where order is All, where an unbroken logic holds the parts together, where disorder defines itself as non-existence, where evil, as St. Augustine held, is delusion, and therefore is not."

"I understand how it was possible for Spinoza to find deep and sustained happiness when he was excommunicated, poor, despised and suspected alike by Jew and Christian; not that the kind world of men ever treated me so, but that his isolation from the universe of sensuous joys is somewhat analogous to mine. He loved the good for its own sake. Like many great spirits he accepted his place in the world, and confided himself childlike to a higher power, believing that it worked through his hands and predominated in his being. He trusted implicitly, and that is what I do. Deep, solemn optimism, it seems to me, should spring from this firm belief in the presence of God in the individual; not a remote, unapproachable governor of the universe, but a God who is very near every one of us, who is present not only in earth, sea and sky, but also in every pure and noble impulse of our hearts, 'the source and centre of all minds, their only point of rest.'"

"To know the history of philosophy is to know that the highest thinkers of the ages, the seers of the tribes and the nations, have been optimists. The growth of philosophy is the story of man's spiritual life."

"The highest result of education is tolerance. Long ago men fought and died for their faith; but it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage, — the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren and their rights of conscience. Tolerance is the first principle of community; it is the spirit which conserves the best that all men think. No loss by flood and lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by the hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed."

"I see the clouds part slowly, and I hear a cry of protest against the bigot. The restraining hand of tolerance is laid upon the inquisitor, and the humanist utters a message of peace to the persecuted. Instead of the cry, "Burn the heretic!" men study the human soul with sympathy, and there enters into their hearts a new reverence for that which is unseen."

"The idea of brotherhood redawns upon the world with a broader significance than the narrow association of members in a sect or creed; and thinkers of great soul like Lessing challenge the world to say which is more godlike, the hatred and tooth-and-nail grapple of conflicting religions, or sweet accord and mutual helpfulness. Ancient prejudice of man against his brother-man wavers and retreats before the radiance of a more generous sentiment, which will not sacrifice men to forms, or rob them of the comfort and strength they find in their own beliefs. The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next. Mere tolerance has given place to a sentiment of brotherhood between sincere men of all denominations."

"The test of all beliefs is their practical effect in life. If it be true that optimism compels the world forward, and pessimism retards it, then it is dangerous to propagate a pessimistic philosophy."

"Let pessimism once take hold of the mind, and life is all topsy-turvy, all vanity and vexation of spirit. There is no cure for individual or social disorder, except in forgetfulness and annihilation. "Let us eat, drink and be merry," says the pessimist, "for to-morrow we die." If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation."

"Who shall dare let his incapacity for hope or goodness cast a shadow upon the courage of those who bear their burdens as if they were privileges?"

"We have found that our great philosophers and our great men of action are optimists. So, too, our most potent men of letters have been optimists in their books and in their lives. No pessimist ever won an audience commensurately wide with his genius, and many optimistic writers have been read and admired out of all measure to their talents, simply because they wrote of the sunlit side of life."

"Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it, while every pessimist would keep the world at a standstill. The consequence of pessimism in the life of a nation is the same as in the life of the individual. Pessimism kills the instinct that urges men to struggle against poverty, ignorance and crime, and dries up all the fountains of joy in the world."

"Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement; nothing can be done without hope."

"I believe it is a sacred duty to encourage ourselves and others; to hold the tongue from any unhappy word against God's world, because no man has any right to complain of a universe which God made good, and which thousands of men have striven to keep good. I believe we should so act that we may draw nearer and more near the age when no man shall live at his ease while another suffers. These are the articles of my faith, and there is yet another on which all depends — to bear this faith above every tempest which overfloods it, and to make it a principal in disaster and through affliction. Optimism is the harmony between man's spirit and the spirit of God pronouncing His works good."

"The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labour. Surely we must free men and women together before we can free women. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands -- the ownership and control of their lives and livelihood -- are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind are ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease. How can women hope to help themselves while we and our brothers are helpless against the powerful organizations which modern parties represent and which contrive to rule the people? They rule the people because they own the means of physical life, land, and tools, and the nourishers of intellectual life, the press, the church, and the school. You say that the conduct of the woman suffragists is being disgracefully misrepresented by the British press. Here in America the leading newspapers misrepresent in every possible way the struggles of toiling men and women who seek relief. News that reflects ill upon the employers is skillfully concealed -- news of dreadful conditions under which labourers are forced to produce, news of thousands of men maimed in mills and mines and left without compensation, news of famines and strikes, news of thousands of women driven to a life of shame, news of little children compelled to labour before their hands are ready to drop their toys. Only here and there in a small and as yet uninfluential paper is the truth told about the workman and the fearful burdens under which he staggers."

"The IWW's affirm as a fundamental principle that the creators of wealth are entitled to all they create. Thus they find themselves pitted against the whole profit-making system. They declare that there can be no compromise so long as the majority of the working class lives in want while the master class lives in luxury. They insist that there can be no peace until the workers organize as a class, take possession of the resources of the earth and the machinery of production and distribution and abolish the wage system. In other words, the workers in their collectivity must own and operate all the essential industrial institutions and secure to each laborer the full value of his product."

"Capitalism will inevitably find itself face to face with a starving multitude of unemployed workers demanding food or destruction of the social order that has starved them and robbed them of their jobs."

"I do not pretend that I know the whole solution of the world's problems, but I am burdened with a Puritanical sense of obligation to set the world to rights. I feel responsible for many enterprises that are not really my business at all, but many times I have kept silence on issues that interested me deeply through the fear that others would be blamed for my opinions. I have never been willing to believe that human nature cannot be changed; but even if it cannot, I am sure it can be curbed and led into channels of usefulness. I believe that life, not wealth, is the aim of existence — life including all its attributes of love, happiness, and joyful labour. I believe war is the inevitable fruit of our economic system, but even if I am wrong I believe that truth can lose nothing by agitation but may gain all."

"Recently I was visited by a very good friend who had just returned from a long walk in the woods, and I asked her what she had observed. “Nothing in particular,” she replied. I might have been incredulous had I not been accustomed to such responses, for long ago I became convinced that the seeing see little. How was it possible, I asked myself, to walk for an hour through the woods and see nothing worthy of note? I who cannot see find hundreds of things to interest me through mere touch. I feel the delicate symmetry of a leaf. I pass my hands lovingly about the smooth skin of a silver birch, or the rough, shaggy bark of a pine. In spring I touch the branches of trees hopefully in search of a bud, the first sign of awakening Nature after her winter's sleep. I feel the delightful, velvety texture of a flower, and discover its remarkable convolutions; and something of the miracle of Nature is revealed to me."

"I who am blind can give one hint to those who see — one admonition to those who would make full use of the gift of sight: Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. And the same method can be applied to other senses. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf to-morrow. Touch each object you want to touch as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again. Make the most of every sense; glory in all the facets of pleasure and beauty which the world reveals to you through the several means of contact which Nature provides."

"Happiness is the final and perfect fruit of obedience to the laws of life."

"A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships."

"It all comes to this: the simplest way to be happy is to do good."

"If we spend the time we waste in sighing for the perfect golden fruit in fulfilling the conditions of its growth, happiness will come, must come. It is guaranteed in the very laws of the universe. If it involves some chastening and renunciation, well, the fruit will be all the sweeter for this touch of holiness...."

"I am only one, but I am one. I can not do everything, but I can do something. I must not fail to do the something that I can do."

"Helen Keller, who to all appearance was born with less possibility for pleasure than any of us, wrote this: "In order to attain his highest education the child must be persistently encouraged to extract joy and constructive interest from sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste... If a mother puts as much gentle art into this delicate fostering of all his physical powers as she does into the task of preserving his health...not only will he reach a well-ordered stewardship of his senses, he will also have the best chance of spiritual maturity...Every person, every group thus excellently equipped for living, is the greatest possible contribution to humanity." "The best chance of spiritual maturity," "a well-ordered stewardship of the senses." This is profound and compassionate advice for all of us, children and grownups alike."

"I feel that in this child I have seen more of the Divine than has been manifest in anyone I ever met before."

"The greatest woman of our age."

"I have been a great admirer of you always."

"Our stand against conscription and our condemnation to prison had gained us many new friends, among them Helen Keller. I had long wanted to meet this remarkable woman who had overcome the most appalling physical disabilities. I had attended one of her lectures, which was to me an affecting experience. Helen Keller's phenomenal conquest had strengthened my faith in the almost illimitable power of the human will. When we had begun our campaign, I wrote to her asking her support. Not receiving a reply for a long time, I concluded that her own life was too difficult to permit interest in the tragedies of the world. Weeks later came a message from her that filled me with shame for having doubted her. Far from being self-absorbed, Helen Keller proved herself capable of an all-embracing love for humanity and profound feeling for its woe and despair...The marvellous woman, bereft of the most vital human senses, could nevertheless, by her chic strength, see and hear and articulate. The electric current of her vibrant fingers on my lips and her sensitized hand over mine spoke more than mere tongue. It eliminated physical barriers and held one in the spell of the beauty of her inner world."

"She will live on, one of the few, the immortal names not born to die. Her spirit will endure as long as man can read and stories can be told of the woman who showed the world there are no boundaries to courage and faith."

"Whatever you were or are, you're a blessing!"

"Southern legislatures tended to place African American deaf and blind students together: for example, the North Carolina State School for the Colored Deaf and Blind; Texas's Institute for Deaf, Dumb and Blind Colored Youth; the Alabama School for the Negro Deaf and Blind; or the Virginia State School for Colored Deaf and Blind. When deafblind activist Helen Keller testified before Congress about the importance of expanding the Social Security Act in 1944, she emphasized discriminatory state funding and the ways in which racism and ableism intersected to limit opportunities. "In my travels up and down the continent," she testified, "I have visited their shabby school buildings and witnessed their pathetic struggles against want. I have been shocked by the meagerness of their education, lack of proper medical care and the discrimination which limits their employment chances." It was a disgrace, she went on, "that in this great wealthy land such injustice should exist to men and women of a different race-and blind at that! It is imperative that colored people without sight be granted financial aid worthy of their human dignity and courage in the face of fearful obstacles.""

"At the People's College in Fort Scott, Kansas, my mother met Arthur Le Sueur, who with Helen Keller, Eugene Debs, and Charles Steinmetz had founded the greatest workers' school in the country. Thousands of farmers and hillbilly men, miners, and other workers took correspondence courses in workers' law and workers' English and workers' history."

"The two greatest characters in the 19th century are Napoleon and Helen Keller. Napoleon tried to conquer the world by physical force and failed. Helen tried to conquer the world by power of mind — and succeeded!"

"I am charmed with your book — enchanted. You are a wonderful creature, the most wonderful in the world — you and your other half together — Miss Sullivan, I mean, for it took the pair of you to make a complete and perfect whole."

"I need not go into any particulars about Helen Keller. She is fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare, and the rest of the immortals. She will be as famous a thousand years from now as she is today."

"No one is more welcome to the House than Helen Keller, whom we love. And she has a genius for finding words for great truths. Her comment on our busy programme was: "Sympathy without works is like eyes without light.""

"The most wonderful being in America,"

"No history of the world can be complete which does not mention Mary Helen Keller... whose overcoming of her blindness and deafness were arguably victories more important than those of Alexander the Great, because they have implications still for every living person."

"Helen Keller, the gifted blind-mute-deaf woman with her extraordinary social vision, commented on the expulsion of Bill Haywood in a letter to the New York Call: “It is with the deepest regret that I have read the attacks upon Comrade Haywood... such an ignoble strife between two factions which should be one, and that, too, at a most critical period in the struggle of the proletariat...What? Are we to put difference of party tactics before the desperate needs of the workers?... While countless women and children are breaking their hearts and ruining their bodies in long days of toil, we are fighting one another. Shame upon us!”"

"Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word."

"Every person is responsible for only the good within his abilities, and for no more, and no one can tell whose sphere is the largest."

"The total depravity of inanimate things."

"And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered."

"Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture."

"Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl."

"Fuck literature."

"A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book."

"The age demanded that we dance And jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed The sort of shit that it demanded."

"My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements."

"God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp-followers."

"I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably be an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows."

"To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic."

"Write me at the Hotel Quintana, Pamplona, Spain. Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something"

"I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred."

"In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more."

"‘It’s his sense of self-preservation.’ ‘The great Italian sense.’ ‘The greatest Italian sense.’"

"Well, Fitz, I looked all through that bible, it was in very fine print and stumbling on that great book Ecclesiastics, read it aloud to all who would listen. Soon I was alone and began cursing the bloody bible because there were no titles in it — although I found the source of practically every good title you ever heard of. But the boys, principally Kipling, had been there before me and swiped all the good ones so I called the book Men Without Women hoping it would have a large sale among the fairies and old Vassar Girls."

"The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life — and one is as good as the other."

"That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward."

"Grace under pressure."

"I know monks masturbate at night That pet cats screw That some girls bite And yet What can I do To set things right?"

"I've been in love (truly) with five women, the Spanish Republic and the 4th Infantry Division."

"Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones."

"When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first."

"Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee."

"That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best — make it all up — but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way."

"Here is the piece. If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment."

"Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does?... The only time it isn't good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief."

"Everyone tries to frighten you now by saying or writing that if one does not become a communist or have a Marxian viewpoint one will have no friends and be alone. They seem to think that to be alone is something dreadful; or that to not have friends is to be hated. I would rather have one honest friend than most of the friends that I have known."

"I cannot be a communist now because I believe in only one thing: liberty. First, I would look after myself and do my work. Then I would care for my family. Then I would help my neighbor. But the state, I care nothing for. All the state has ever meant to me is unjust taxation... I believe in the absolute minimum of government."

"A writer is like a Gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government. If he is a good writer, he will never like the government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him. The minute anyone knows any bureaucracy well enough, he will hate it. Because the minute it passes a certain size it must be unjust."

"I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot, i.e., loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better), you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink."

"Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter."

"Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called by the Masai "Ngàje Ngài," the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude."

"However you make your living is where your talent lies."

"The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, "Yes, they have more money.""

"Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it."

"Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish and of forgetting that the fish has a hook in his mouth, his gullet, or his belly and that his gameness is really an extreme of panic in which he runs, leaps, and pulls to get away until he dies. It would seem to be enough advantage to the angler that the fish has the hook in his mouth rather than the angler."

"There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is Fascism. For Fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live or work under Fascism. Because Fascism is a lie, it is condemned to literary sterility. And when it is past, it will have no history, except the bloody history of murder."

"For our dead are a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die."

"As long as all our dead live in the Spanish earth, and they will live as long as the earth lives, no system of tyranny ever will prevail in Spain."

"The dead do not need to rise. They are a part of the earth now and the earth can never be conquered. For the earth endureth forever...Those who have entered it honorably, and no man ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain, already have achieved immortality."

"There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention."

"I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it."

"Go tell Mike Gold, Ernest Hemingway says he should go fuck himself."

"Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination."

"Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war."

"In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused."

"All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time."

"It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics."

"You see it's awfully hard to talk or write about your own stuff because if it is any good you yourself know about how good it is — but if you say so yourself you feel like a shit."

"Do you remember how old Ford was always writing how Conrad suffered so when he wrote? How it was un metier de chien etc. Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing."

"Easy writing makes hard reading."

"It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings."

"Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start."

"I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better."

"Wars are Spinach. Life in general is the tough part. In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and co-ordinates."

"Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up."

"I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering."

"I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently."

"You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple."

"Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."

"Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light."

"Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time)."

"You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it."

"As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen."

"I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't."

"Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin. For history's sake we shouldn't keep him there."

"It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and can coast down them. ... Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motorcar only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle."

"We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master."

"Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it — don't cheat with it."

"If you have a success, you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work."

"I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it."

"When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea."

"You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice."

"It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way."

"You're beautiful, like a May fly."

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut!"

"Everybody was drunk. The whole battery was drunk going along the road in the dark. We were going to the Champagne. The lieutenant kept riding his horse out into the fields and saying to him, “I’m drunk, I tell you, mon vieux. Oh, I am so soused.”"

"While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh jesus christ get me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please please christ. If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say. I believe in you and I’ll tell everyone in the world that you are the only thing that matters. Please please dear jesus. The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody."

"One hot evening in Milan they carried him up onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town. There were chimney swifts in the sky. After a while it got dark and the searchlights came out. The others went down and took the bottles with them. He and Ag could hear them below on the balcony. Ag sat on the bed. She was cool and fresh in the hot night."

"I heard the drums coming down the street and then the fifes and the pipes and then they came around the corner, all dancing. The street full of them. Maera saw him and then I saw him. When they stopped the music for the crouch he hunched down in the street with them all and when they started it again he jumped up and went dancing down the street with them. He was drunk all right. 'You go down after him', said Maera, 'he hates me'."

"They hanged Sam Cardinella at six o’clock in the morning in the corridor of the county jail. The corridor was high and narrow with tiers of cells on either side. All the cells were occupied. The men had been brought in for the hanging. Five men sentenced to be hanged were in the five top cells. Three of the men to be hanged were negroes. They were very frightened. One of the white men sat on his cot with his head in his hands. The other lay flat on his cot with a blanket wrapped around his head. They came out onto the gallows through a door in the wall. There were six or seven of them including two priests. They were carrying Sam Cardinella. He had been like that since about four o’clock in the morning. While they were strapping his legs together two guards held him up and the two priests were whispering to him. “Be a man, my son,” said one priest."

"The king was working in the garden. He seemed very glad to see me. We walked through the garden. This is the queen, he said. She was clipping a rose bush. Oh how do you do, she said. We sat down at a table under a big tree and the king ordered whiskey and soda. We have good whiskey anyway, he said."

"Yogi Johnson stood looking out of the window of a big pump-factory in Michigan. Spring would soon be here. Could it be that what this writing fellow Hutchinson had said, 'If winter comes, can spring be far behind?' would be true again this year? Yogi Johnson wondered."

"It is very hard to write this way, beginning things backward, and the author hopes the reader will realize this and not grudge this little word of explanation. I know I would be very glad to read anything the reader ever wrote, and I hope the reader will make the same sort of allowances. If any of the readers would care to send me anything they ever wrote, for criticism or advice, I am always at the Café du Dôme any afternoon, talking about Art with Harold Stearns and Sinclair Lewis, and the reader can bring his stuff along with him, or he can send it to me care of my bank, if I have a bank."

"Red Dog smiled. 'I would like you to meet my friends Mr Sitting Bull, Mr Poisoned Buffalo, and Chief Running Skunk-Backwards.' 'Sitting Bull's a name I know,' Yogi remarked, shaking hands. 'Oh, I'm not one of those Sitting Bulls,' Mr Sitting Bull said."

"'Listen Jake... don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you are not taking advantage of it?'"

"I try and play it along and just not make trouble for people. Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn't run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have."

"A bottle of wine was good company."

"All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault."

"This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste."

"You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés."

"'How did you go bankrupt?' Bill asked. 'Two ways,' Mike said. 'Gradually and then suddenly.'"

"'You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.' 'Yes.' 'It's sort of what we have instead of God.'"

"'Oh, Jake,' Brett said, 'we could have had such a damned good time together.' Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me. 'Yes,' I said. 'Isn't it pretty to think so?'"

"Four times he swung with the bull, lifting the cape so it billowed full, and each time bringing the bull around to charge again. Then, at the end of the fifth swing, he held the cape against his hip and pivoted, so the cape swung out like a ballet dancer’s skirt and wound the bull around himself like a belt, to step clear, leaving the bull facing Zurito on the white horse, come up and planted firm, the horse facing the bull, its ears forward, its lips nervous, Zurito, his hat over his eyes, leaning forward, the long pole sticking out before and behind in a sharp angle under his right arm, held half-way down, the triangular iron point facing the bull."

"The boys at first were very polite about my medals and asked me what I had done to get them. I showed them the papers, which were written in very beautiful language and full of fratellanza and abnegazione, but which really said, with the adjectives removed, that I had been given the medals because I was an American. After that their manner changed a little toward me, although I was their friend against outsiders."

"We’ll wait and see. Come on back in the shade, he said. You mustn’t feel that way. I don’t feel any way, the girl said. I just know things. I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do—— Nor that isn’t good for me, she said. I know. Could we have another beer? All right. But you’ve got to realize—— I realize, the girl said. Can’t we maybe stop talking? They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table. You’ve got to realize, he said, that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you. Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along. Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want any one else. And I know it’s perfectly simple. Yes, you know it’s perfectly simple. It’s all right for you to say that, but I do know it. Would you do something for me now? I’d do anything for you. Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?"

"In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken."

"All thinking men are atheists."

"I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success."

"You're my religion. You're all I've got."

"Life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose."

"I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it."

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."

"No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful."

"'Darling, would you like to grow a beard?' 'Would you like me to?' 'It might be fun. I'd like to see you with a beard.' 'All right. I'll grow one. I'll start now this minute. It's a good idea. It will give me something to do.'"

"That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you."

"About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."

"Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic."

"All our words from loose using have lost their edge."

"Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts."

"Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor."

"Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a thing as water, wine, or olive oil. There is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ."

"But waiting for a messiah is a long business and you get many fake ones."

"The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own."

"There is no remedy for anything in life. Death is a sovereign remedy for all misfortunes."

"There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it."

"Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times."

"Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."

"It is always a mistake to know an author."

"Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over."

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things only because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing."

"A serious writer is not to be confused with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl."

"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature."

"There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave."

"When a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes; that of giving it."

"The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after."

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."

"The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do."

"Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about."

"Personal columnists ... are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat — no matter who killed the meat for him."

"If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work."

"All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens."

"War is no longer made by simply analysed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule."

"We in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the pre-meditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes."

"They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason."

"Hit in the head you will die quickly and cleanly even sweetly and fittingly except for the white blinding flash that never stops, unless perhaps it is only the frontal bone or your optic nerve that is smashed, or your jaw carried away, or your nose and cheek bones gone so you can still think but you have no face to talk with. But if you are not hit in the head you will be hit in the chest, and choke in it, or in the lower belly, and feel it all slip and slide loosely as you open, to spill out when you try to get up, it's not supposed to be so painful but they always scream with it, it's the idea I suppose, or have the flash, the slamming clang of high explosive on a hard road and find your legs are gone above the knee, or maybe just a foot gone and watch the white bone sticking through your puttee, or watch them take a boot off with your foot a mush inside it, or feel an arm flop and learn how a bone feels grating, or you will burn, choke and vomit, or be blown to hell a dozen ways, without sweetness or fittingness: but none of this means anything. No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough."

"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists."

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

"I have a good life but I must write because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my life."

"Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged."

"The best sky was in Italy and Spain and northern Michigan in the fall and in the fall in the Gulf off Cuba."

"[T]he rain was making the finest sound that we, who live much outside of houses, ever hear."

"They [the best of the Masai] had that attitude that makes brothers, that unexpressed but instant and complete acceptance that you must be Masai wherever it is you come from. That attitude you only get from the best of the English, the best of the Hungarians and the very best Spaniards; the thing that used to be the most clear distinction of nobility when there was nobility. It is an ignorant attitude and the people who have it do not survive, but very few pleasanter things ever happen to you than the encountering of it."

"I was so sentimental about you I'd break any one's heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It's broken and gone. Everything I believe in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have? And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is that quinine and quinine and quinine until I'm deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. Its half atheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like Lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to any more. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I'm through with you and I'm through with love. Your kind of picknose love."

"At pier four there is a 34-foot yawl-rigged yacht with two of the three hundred and twenty-four Esthonians who are sailing around in different parts of the world, in boats between 28 and 36 feet long and sending back articles to the Esthonian newspapers. These articles are very popular in Esthonia and bring their authors between a dollar and a dollar and thirty cents a column. They take the place occupied by the baseball or football news in American newspapers and are run under the heading of Sagas of Our Intrepid Voyagers. No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sun-burned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article. When it comes they will set sail to another yacht basin and write another saga. They are very happy too. Almost as happy as the people on the Alzira III. It's great to be an Intrepid Voyager."

""Just kiss me." She kissed him on the cheek. "No." "Where do the noses go? I always wondered where the noses would go." "Look, turn thy head" and then their mouths were tight together."

"I am no romantic glorifier of the Spanish woman, nor did I ever think of a casual piece as anything much other than a casual piece in any country. But when I am with Maria I love her so that I feel, literally, as though I would die and I never believed in that or thought that it could happen."

"What a business. You go along your whole life and they seem as though they mean something and they always end up not meaning anything. There was never any of what this is. You think that is one thing you will never have. And then, on a lousy show like this, co-ordinating two chicken-crut guerilla bands to help you blow a bridge under impossible conditions, to abort a counter-offensive that will probably already be started, you run into a girl like this Maria."

"For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them."

"If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, "Impossible," when orders came?"

"Then they were walking along the stream together and he said, “Maria, I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.” “Oh,” she said. “I die each time. Do you not die?” “No. Almost. But did thee feel the earth move?” “Yes. As I died. Put thy arm around me, please.”"

"'But are there not many Fascists in your country?' 'There are many who do not know they are Fascists, but will find it out when the time comes'."

"He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any man could have."

"That tomorrow should come and that I should be there."

"If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it."

"There's no one thing that's true. It's all true."

"Dying is only bad when it takes a long time and hurts so much that it humiliates you."

"Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of war is that way."

"We have come out of the time when obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage and resolution were most important, into that more difficult time when it is a man's duty to understand his world rather than simply fight for it."

"It would be easy for us, if we do not learn to understand the world and appreciate the rights, privileges and duties of al other countries and peoples, to represent in our power the same danger to the world that Fascism did."

"No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself."

"An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead."

"We have fought this war and won it. Now let us not be sanctimonious; nor hypocritical; nor vengeful; nor stupid. Let us make our enemies incapable of ever making war again, let us re-educate them, let us learn to live in peace and justice with all countries and all peoples in this world. To do this we must educate and re-educate. But first we must educate ourselves."

"They started two hours before daylight, and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead. In each boat, in the darkness, so you could not see, but only hear him, the poler stood in the stern, with his long oar. The shooter sat on a shooting stool fastened to the top of a box that contained his lunch and shells, and the shooter's two, or more, guns were propped against the load of wooden decoys. Somewhere, in each boat, there was a sack with one or two live mallard hens, or a hen and a drake, and in each boat there was a dog who shifted and shivered uneasily at the sound of the wings of the ducks that passed overhead in the darkness."

"'Tell me some true things about fighting.' 'Tell me you love me.' 'I love you,' the girl said. 'You can publish it in the Gazzettino if you like. I love your hard, flat body and your strange eyes that frighten me when they become wicked. I love your hand and all your other wounded places.'"

"'What happens to people that love each other?' 'I suppose they have whatever they have and they are more fortunate than others. Then one of them gets the emptiness for ever.'"

"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week."

"“Age is my alarm clock,” the old man said. “Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?” “I don’t know,” the boy said. “All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard.”"

"Every day above earth is a good day."

"He always thought of the sea as la mar, which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her, but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fisherman, those who used buoys as floats for their lines or had motorboats bought when the shark lovers had much money, spoke of her as el mar, which is masculine, they spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine, as something that gave or withheld great favors. If she did wild or wicked things, it is because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought."

"Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so."

"Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man. Or a fish, he thought."

"“Fish,” he said, “I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.”"

"'But man is not made for defeat,' he said. 'A man can be destroyed but not defeated.'"

"'Ay,' he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood."

"Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is."

"Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready."

"You did not do so badly for something that is worthless. But there was a time when I could not find you."

"It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, he thought. “Nothing,” he said aloud. “I went out too far.”"

"Anyone who goes on the sea the year around in a small power boat does not seek danger. You may be absolutely sure that in a year you will have it without seeking, so you try always to avoid it all you can."

"No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience."

"Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten. Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed."

"How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him."

"A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it."

"You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love."

"Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it."

"I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made."

"From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?"

"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it."

"Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved."

"All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently... Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness."

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."

"As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans."

"I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.""

"The only thing that could spoil a day was people.... People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself."

"You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you were skipping meals at a time when you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to do it was the Luxembourg gardens... There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were heightened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry."

"Then I started to think in Lipp's about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d'Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called "Out of Season" and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood."

"They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure."

"Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre."

"I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man.... Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist."

"All things truly wicked start from an innocence."

"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless."

"One battle doesn't make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war."

"'Why, you sad son-of-a-bitch, how can you be so cocky and stand there and block cars when you're nothing but a miserable bear and a black bear at that - not even a polar or a grizzly or anything worth while.'"

"Never confuse movement with action."

"Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age."

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."

"The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal."

"Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock.""

"Only three things in my life I've really liked to do - hunt, write and make love."

"You can have true affection for only a few things in your life, and by getting rid of material things, I make sure I won't waste mine on something that can't feel my affection."

"To be a successful father ... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years."

"The way to learn whether a person is trustworthy is to trust him."

"All good books have one thing in common — they are truer than if they had really happened."

"Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth: Hemingstein's Law on the Dynamics of Dying."

"But don't try to find an untroublesome woman. She will dull out on you. What makes a woman good in bed makes it impossible for her to live alone."

"But that story has in it the only constructive thing I ever learned about women - that no matter what happened to them and how they turned, you should try to disregard all that and remember them only as they were on the best day they ever had."

"The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is. Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do - and makes you what you are - is to back up into the grave."

"You write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer."

"What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient. It's a bum turn, Hotch, terrible."

"The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship. It was shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind and on the ocean side you could walk out of the door and down the bluff across the white sand and into the Gulf Stream. The water of the Stream was usually a dark blue when you looked out at it when there was no wind. But when you walked out into it there was just the green light of the water over that floury white sand and you could see the shadow of any big fish a long time before he could ever come in close to the beach. It was a safe and fine place to bathe in the day but it was no place to swim at night. At night the sharks came in close to the beach, hunting at the edge of the Stream, and from the upper porch of the house on quiet nights you could hear the splashing of the fish they hunted and if you went down to the beach you could see the phosphorescent wakes they made in the water. At night the sharks had no fear and everything else feared them. But in the day they stayed out away from the clear white sand and if they did come in you could see their shadows a long way away."

"Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself."

"Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable."

"'You're going to write straight and simple and good now. That's the start.' 'What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?' 'Write how you are but make it straight.'"

"'Shit,' said Eddie. 'What the fuck they kill that Davy for?' 'Let's leave it alone, Eddy,' Thomas Hudson said. 'It's way past things we know about.'"

"Get it straight. Your boy you lose. Love you lose. Honor has been gone for a long time. Duty you do. Sure and what's your duty? What I said I'd do. And all the other things you said you'd do?"

"All a man has is pride. Sometimes you have it so much it is a sin. We have all done things for pride that we knew were impossible. We didn't care. But a man must implement his pride with intelligence and care."

"Well, I know what I have to do, so it is simple. Duty is a wonderful thing. I do not know what I should have done without duty since young Tom died. You could have painted, he told himself. Or you could have done something useful. Maybe, he thought. Duty is simpler. This is useful, he thought. Do not think against it. It helps to get it over with. That's all we are working for. Christ knows what there is beyond that."

"Everybody is friends when things are bad enough."

"Now Tom was - the hell with that, he said to himself. It is something that happens to everybody. I should know about that by now. It is the only thing that is really final, though. How do you know that? he asked himself. Going away can be final. Walking out the door can be final. Any form of real betrayal can be final. Dishonesty can be final. Selling out is final. But you are just talking now. Death is what is really final."

"But life is a cheap thing beside a man's work. The only thing is that you need it."

"You never understand anybody that loves you."

"It was strange going back to Spain again: I had never expected to be allowed to return to the country that I loved more than any other except my own and I would not return so long as any of my friends there were in jail. But in the spring of 1953 in Cuba I talked with good friends who had fought on opposing sides in the Spanish Civil War about stopping in Spain on our way to Africa and they agreed that I might honorably return to Spain if I did not recant anything that I had written and kept my mouth shut on politics. There was no question of applying for a visa. They were no longer required for American tourists."

"They say that if you can stay away from bullfighting for a year you can stay away from it forever. That is not true but it has some truth in it and, except for fights in Mexico, I had been away for fourteen years. A lot of that time though was like being in jail except that I was locked out; not locked in."

"Fortunately I have never learned to take the good advice I give myself nor the counsel of my fears."

"Like all truly brave people Antonio is light-hearted and likes to joke and make fun of serious things."

"The faces that were young once were old as mine but everyone remembered how we were. The eyes had not changed and nobody was fat. No mouths were bitter no matter what the eyes had seen. Bitter lines around the mouth are the first sign of defeat. Nobody was defeated."

"We had spoken about death without being morbid about it and I had told Antonio what I thought about it which is worthless since none of us knows anything about it."

"Any man can face death but to be committed to bring it as close as possible while performing certain classic movements and do this again and again and again and then deal it out yourself with a sword to an animal weighing half a ton which you love is more complicated than just facing death. It is facing your performance as a creative artist each day and your necessity to function as a skillful killer. Antonio had to kill quickly and mercifully and still give the bull one full chance at him when he crossed over the horn at least twice a day. Everyone in bullfighting helps everyone else in bullfighting in the ring. In spite of all rivalries and hatreds it is the closest brotherhood there is. Only bullfighters know the risks they run and what the bull can do with his horns to their bodies and their minds."

"Antonio always prayed in the room before the fight at the last when the well-wishers and the followers were gone. If there was time at the ring nearly everyone slipped into the chapel to pray once before the paseo. Antonio knew I prayed for him and never for myself. I was not fighting and I had quit praying for myself during the Spanish Civil War when I saw the terrible things that happened to other people and I felt that to pray for oneself was selfish and egotistical."

"Luis Miguel had the pride of the devil and a feeling of absolute superiority that was justified in many things. He had said so long that he was the best that he really believed it. He had to believe it to go on. It was not just something he believed. It was his belief."

"[W]hen he came out of the anaesthetic the first thing he said was, 'What a man Ernesto would be if he could only write.'"

"A bullfighter can never see the work of art that he is making. He has no chance to correct it as a painter or writer has. He cannot hear it as a musician can. He can only feel it and hear the crowd's reaction to it. When he feels it and knows that it is great it takes hold of him so that nothing else in the world matters. All the time that he is making his work of art he knows that he must keep within the limits of his skill and his knowledge of the animal. Those matadors are called cold who visibly show that they are thinking of this. Antonio was not cold and the public belonged to him now. He looked up at them and let them know, modestly but not humbly, that he knew it and as he circled the ring with the ear in his hand he looked at the different segments of Bilbao, a city that he loved, as they stood up as he passed and was happy that he owned them."

"'But I get so hungry,' she said. 'Is it normal do you think? Do you always get so hungry when you make love?' 'When you love somebody.'"

"'Please love me David the way I am. Please understand and love me.'"

"'I didn't marry her family.' 'Of course not. But you always do. Dead or alive.'"

"'Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong.' 'You think so?' 'I'm quite sure. If you don't it doesn't matter. Nothing will matter then.'"

"'Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.'"

"A man must comport himself as a man. He must fight always preferably and soundly with the odds in his favor but on necessity against any sort of odds and with no thought of the outcome. He should follow his tribal laws and customs insofar as he can and accept the tribal discipline when he cannot. But it is never a reproach that he has kept a child's heart, a child's honesty and a child's freshness and nobility."

"This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it."

"In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable."

"When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead."

"Miss Mary, having been a journalist, had splendid powers of invention. I had never heard her tell a story in the same way twice and always had the feeling she was remolding it for the later editions."

"I was as afraid as the next man in my time and maybe more so. But with the years, fear had come to be regarded as a form of stupidity to be classed with overdrafts, acquiring a venereal disease or eating candies. Fear is a child's vice and while I loved to feel it approach, as one does with any vice, it was not for grown men and the only thing to be afraid of was the presence of true and imminent danger in a form that you should be aware of and not be a fool if you were responsible for others."

"The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too."

"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"

"Human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not."

"It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end."

"There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games."

"Why did the chicken cross the road? Hemingway: To die. In the rain."

"When people talk about American literature, they really mean Hemingway, Faulkner and Poe and when they do include women it's Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay. To decide to take that on and say, 'I will speak and will be heard'-that takes a lot of guts."

"I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer."

"Being a professional author is a great job. You get to work at home, be your own boss, and wear whatever you want. Fact: Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises wearing a penguin costume."

"Below us there were hundreds of men from the British, the Canadian Battalions; a food truck had come up, and they were being fed. A new Matford roadster drove around the hill and stopped near us, and two men got out we recognized. One was tall, thin, dressed in brown corduroy, wearing horn-shelled glasses. He had a long, ascetic face, firm lips, a gloomy look about him. The other was taller, heavy, red-faced, one of the largest men you will ever see; he worse steel-rimmed glasses and a bushy mustache. These were Herbert Matthews of The New York Times and Ernest Hemingway, and they were just as relieved to see us as we were to see them."

"Hemingway was eager as a child, and I smiled remembering the first time I had seen him, at a Writers' Congress in New York. He was making his maiden public speech, and when it didn't read right, he got mad at it, repeating the sentences he had fumbled, with exceptional vehemence. Now he was like a big kid, and you liked him. He asked questions like a kid: "What then? What happened then? And what did you do? And what did he say? And then what did you do?" Matthews said nothing, but he took notes on a folded sheet of paper. "What's your name?" said Hemingway; I told him. "Oh," he said, "I'm awful glad to see you; I've read your stuff." I knew he was glad to see me; it made me feel good, and I felt sorry about the times I had lambasted him in print; I hoped he had forgotten them, or never read them. "Here," he said, reading in his pocket. "I've got more." He handed me a full pack of Lucky Strikes."

"Hemingway did not seem discouraged, but Matthews was. Hemingway said, sure, they would get to the sea, but that was nothing to worry about. It had been foreseen; it would be taken care of; methods had already been worked out for communication between Catalonia and the rest of Spain; by ship, by plane, everything would be all right. Roosevelt, he said, had made an unofficial offer- or so he had been told- to ship two hundred planes to France, if France would ship two hundred planes to Spain. That was one of the best things we had ever heard of Roosevelt, but where were they?"

"I grew up, you know, in a generation of war novels and macho—Hemingway’s being the most prominent."

"Mr. Theodore Kaufman, an American resident, tries to calculate [in his pamphlet Germany Must Perish] how many doctors and how much time it would take to sterilize all Germans. This idea was eagerly taken up by Mr. Ernest Hemingway who defended it in his preface to Men at War on pp. xxiii-xxiv. (New York, 1942.) Scratch a "democrat" and you always find a Nazi."

"[Hemingway] has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used."

"Do you know a good way to convince ladies who adore he-men that you are a he-man and not a sissy? Raise a challenging mustache, write a humorless book full of unabridged hells and damns and kindred phrases in the field of sex, and then come out blatantly in favor of the Loyalists' cause in Spain."

"I love Fitzgerald and Hemingway—especially the Hemingway of the stories...I wasn’t alone in being influenced by Hemingway. He had a great impact, I think, on modern Italian writing."

"He was a prickly character and rather exacting about financial matters in a way I found tiresome."

"I would like to see a world in which male writers wrote without masculinist bias, in which for example Hemingway's masculinist mythology (and that of many other contemporary American male writers) was perceived as quite as bizarre and hysterical as the most absurd excesses of militant feminist fiction, and in which consciousness had become so truly androgynous that the adjective itself would be puzzlingly obsolete."

"Right now I'm going to go to the J.F.K. Library [in Boston] to read the manuscript of The Garden of Eden. That was Hemingway's last book. The published version is not the whole thing; it's only 250 pages. There are two thousand pages of manuscript. Hemingway was trying to find a language that was about relationships and about community. In some senses he failed because now he is known for shooting all those animals, for bullfights and his suicide. But he was reaching for something else. He didn't burn the book; he just left it there. But he wasn't strong enough to see it through to publication. A lot of it has to do with sexual roles, and so I just want to see what he was aiming for. He's got a map of the shape of a novel, and I expect him to take me so far and then I'm going to have to go the rest of the way…he is our father. He is everybody's "papa." He told us he was, so I guess he is [she laughs]. He left some kind of a map. Like I say in China Men, my grandfather left the railroad as a message. Well, Father Hemingway left The Garden of Eden manuscript, and I want to find out where I'm going next."

"In his history of war correspondence, British author Phillip Knightley, a [Spanish] loyalist sympathizer, chastizes [sic] Hemingway for his "total failure to report the communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of 'untrustworthy' elements on the Republican side [of the Spanish civil war of the 1930s], when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might have prevented further horrors like this.""

"For Isaac Kotlarz, reinterpreting the past went together with a certain bad conscience: "Later on, when I read Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, I found an enlightenment that did not correspond to the official fables: that reminded me of facts I had heard spoken of in Spain, but which I had not paid attention to at that time.""

"People should be able to figure out their place in the life-death cycle without killing animals. The trouble is that it relates to what Hemingway said: "You can't be a man until you've killed another one." I say bullshit! Why don't you try it without a gun? Maybe there's a gender difference there. Maybe a woman can do it and a man can't. I hate to say that, but you wonder. It isn't built into women to be hunters in our culture. Even a fisherwoman is unusual. Having a close relationship with an animal, particularly one that lives a short life, can be an intense, constant reminder of mortality."

"Hemingway, after a honeymoon of Stalinist favor, would receive his share of comradely vituperation a few years later-when he, in his turn, would tell too much about the communists in Spain in his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls."

"In an American Literature class, the professor told us The Sun Also Rises was boring on purpose. Apparently, Hemingway was trying to capture Europe's useless frivolity from the 1920s—or something. I had read elsewhere that Hemingway loved every minute of his time over there, and when I said as much the teacher replied, “In this class we go through the author’s intentions and into what the book actually was.” What I learned: Hemingway should have taken a Hemingway class."

"As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it."

"Ernest Hemingway ate an apple before writing. This might or might not have explained his crisp, short sentences."

"American society, literary or lay, tends to be humorless. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?"

"I wonder now what Ernest Hemingway's dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that everybody can spell and truly understand."

"You have to be an accomplished writer to imitate Henry James. Any journalist can produce a not quite passable imitation of Mr Hemingway. But it was not only the invention in technique that impressed us in Fiesta. It was the mood. English literature is peculiarly rich in first-class Philistine novelists – Surtees and Mr P. G. Wodehouse, for example. But their characters were always happy. Mr Hemingway has melancholy, a sense of doom. His men and women are as sad as those huge, soulless apes that huddle in their cages at the zoo."

"For Whom the Bell Tolls was not at all what the socialists wanted. They had been busy denying atrocities; Mr Hemingway described them in detail with relish. They had denied the presence of the Russians; Mr Hemingway led us straight into the front door of the Gaylord Hotel. He made Marty and la Passionaria as comic as any New Yorker correspondent could have done. From then on he was on the wrong side of the barricades for the socialists, while his pounding revolutionary heart still drove him from civilization."

"Behind all the bluster and cursing and fisticuffs he has an elementary sense of chivalry – respect for women, pity of the weak, love of honour – which keeps breaking in."

"Take Hemingway. People always think that the reason he's easy to read is that he is concise. He isn't. I hate conciseness — it's too difficult. The reason Hemingway is easy to read is that he repeats himself all the time, using 'and' for padding."

"On fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact."

"Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said."

"Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good."

"[Everything] ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development."

"Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind."

"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment."

"That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions."

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim."

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

"The highest form of vanity is love of fame."

"The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice."

"To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love."

"It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation."

"Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate."

"Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble, it must remain rare, if common, it must become mean."

"What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art."

"When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different."

"In proportion as a man's interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates and expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach the same impersonal level of ideas."

"Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them."

"Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them."

"Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion."

"Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit."

"Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor."

"To know how just a cause we have for grieving is already a consolation."

"The mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a truth, however unwelcome to the flesh, or discover an actual force, however unfavourable to given interests."

"Art like life should be free, since both are experimental."

"History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not what science necessarily rest on. In order to sift evidence we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe."

"When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind...They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country."

"Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature's meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal."

"Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome."

"Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself."

"Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood."

"The Bible is literature, not dogma."

"To covet truth is a very distinguished passion."

"Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained."

"No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right. ** p. 49"

"Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand."

"To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic."

"In Walt Whitman democracy is carried into psychology and morals. The various sights, moods, and emotions are given each one vote; they are declared to be all free and equal, and the innumerable commonplace moments of life are suffered to speak like the others. Those moments formerly reputed great are not excluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their companions—plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour."

"Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge."

"The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him."

"Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind."

"Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its Christianity, in practice, must be largely converted to paganism."

"Persons who feel themselves to be exiles in this world—and what noble mind, from Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?—are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another."

"No doubt the spirit or energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves."

"Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole world is doing things."

"The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it."

"England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors."

"Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master."

"The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be."

"There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval."

"To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together."

"Prosperity, both for individuals and for states, means possessions; and possessions mean burdens and harness and slavery; and slavery for the mind, too, because it is not only the rich man's time that is pre-empted, but his affections, his judgement, and the range of his thoughts."

"Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and British in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life, it now believes, is not the pursuit of liberty and happiness of all sorts by all sorts of different creatures; it is the development of a single spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each higher than the preceding one. No man, accordingly, can really or ultimately desire anything but what the best people desire. This is the principle of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all earnest liberals are higher snobs."

"It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy;"

"Liberalism has merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate interest may fight with every other for domination. Whoever is victorious in this struggle will make an end of liberalism; and the new order, which will deem itself saved, will have to defend itself in the following age against a new crop of rebels."

"I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty."

"Only the dead have seen the end of war."

"My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests."

"The living have never shown me how to live."

"Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are."

"Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots."

"Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness."

"[The empiricist] thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing."

"Philosophers are as jealous as women. Each wants a monopoly of praise."

"The soul, too, has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit."

"The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool."

"All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."

"Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace."

"American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."

"All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg."

"At midday the daily food of all Spaniards was the puchero or cocido, as the dish is really called which the foreigners call pot-pourri or olla podrida. This contains principally yellow chick-peas, with a little bacon, some potatoes or other vegetables and normally also small pieces of beef or sausage, all boiled in one pot at a very slow fire; the liquid of the same makes the substantial broth that is served first."

"... I once shook hands with Longfellow at a garden party in 1881; and I often saw Dr. Holmes, who was our neighbor in Beacon Street: but Emerson I never saw."

"Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age."

"In solitude it is possible to love mankind; in the world, for one who knows the world, there can be nothing but secret or open war."

"I was still “at the church door”. Yet in belief, in the clarification of my philosophy, I had taken an important step. I no longer wavered between alternative views of the world, to be put on or taken off like alternative plays at the theatre. I now saw that there was only one possible play, the actual history of nature and of mankind, although there might well be ghosts among the characters and soliloquies among the speeches. Religions, all religions, and idealistic philosophies, all idealistic philosophies, were the soliloquies and the ghosts. They might be eloquent and profound. Like Hamlet's soliloquy they might be excellent reflective criticisms of the play as a whole. Nevertheless they were only parts of it, and their value as criticisms lay entirely in their fidelity to the facts, and to the sentiments which those facts aroused in the critic."

"O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies; To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art."

"In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour."

"Although a poem be not made by counting of syllables upon the fingers, yet "numbers" is the most poetical synonym we have for verse, and "measure" the most significant equivalent for beauty, for goodness, and perhaps even for truth. Those early and profound philosophers, the followers of Pythagoras, saw the essence of all things in number, and it was by weight, measure, and number, as we read in the Bible, that the Creator first brought Nature out of the void."

"There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable."

"They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life."

"Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily."

"I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free, from world to world, from all worlds carried me."

"The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity."

"A child educated only at school is an uneducated child."

"Religions are not true or false, but better or worse."

"The earth has music for those who listen."

"The working of great administrations is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought."

"The famous George Santayana quote: “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” That's the thing, though. None of us have forgotten. Darned if we're not repeating it anyway..."

"Books are “imaginative rehearsals for living,” stated novelist George Santayana. They are also a great equalizer in a diverse society. Book reading helps prepare a child for mental liberation from ignorance, fear, and falsehood."

"The writer-philosopher George Santayana is credited with the phrase: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Yet here we are, repeating that of just 52 years ago. Let us pray that come 2072, Americans then have at last heeded Santayana's warning and Dr. King’s dream is no longer words in a speech but reality being lived."

"I revelled in the keen analysis of William James, Josiah Royce and young George Santayana."

"But what a perfection of rottenness in a philosophy!"

"In America literary reputations come and go so swiftly," I complained, fatuously. [Santayana's] answer was swift. "It would be insufferable if they did not."

""There is no God, and Mary is his mother." Often, almost certainly incorrectly, attributed to Santayana himself. More plausibly attributed to Robert Lowell, as a sardonic description of Santayana's philosophy."

"Santayana, indeed, is the Moses of the new naturalism, who discerned the promised land from afar but still wanders himself in the desert realms of being."

"I love things made out of animals," Sedaris says, holding a knife with a hoof for a handle. "It's just so funny to think of someone saying, 'I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.'"

"Shit is the tofu of cursing."

"I read "Revolutionary Road" once a year. Aside from its word-by-word construction, I love how his characters deceive themselves."

"What did Trish's mother say when her daughter, heartbroken over her breakup with Randy, came to her in search of love and understanding? 'If you're looking for sympathy you can find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.'"

"Last Christmas I received a set of golf clubs that, my father likes to remind me, cost a goddamned fortune. He says that he would give his right arm for such a beautiful set of clubs."

"Over Christmas we looked through boxes of family pictures and played a game we call 'Find Mom, find Mom's cigarettes.' There's one in every picture. We've got photos of her pregnant, leaning toward a lit match, and others of her posing with her newborn babies, the smoke forming a halo above our heads. These pictures gave us a warm feeling. She smoked in the bathtub, where we'd find her drowned butts lined up in a neat row beside the shampoo bottle. She smoked through meals, and often used her half-empty plate as an ashtray. Mom's theory was that if you cooked the meal and did the dishes, you were allowed to use your plate however you liked."

"'Of course he died,' the window washer said. 'You can't take more than a four-storey fall, not in this town anyway. Then Jeffrey Lee got off the phone and said that, given a choice, he'd rather fall from a higher floor as it would allow more time for his life to flash before his eyes. The window man said that all depends on the life you led."

"I Photo Elfed all day for a variety of Santas and it struck me that many of the parents don't allow their children to speak at all. A child sits upon Santa's lap and the parents say, 'All right now, Amber, tell Santa what you want. Tell him you want a Baby Alive and My Pretty Ballerina and that winter coat you saw in the catalog.' The parents name the gifts they have already bought. They don't want to hear the word 'pony' or 'television set,' so they talk through the entire visit, placing words in the child's mouth. When the child hops off the lap, the parents address their children, each and every time, with, 'What do you say to Santa?' The child says, 'Thank you, Santa.' It is sad because you would like to believe that everyone is unique and then they disappoint you every time by being exactly the same, asking for the same things, reciting the exact same lines as though they have been handed a script. All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to the fingerprints."

""You kids think you invented sex," my mother was fond of saying. But hadn't we? With no instruction manual or federally enforced training period, didn't we all come away feeling we'd discovered something unspeakably modern? What produced in others a feeling of exhilaration left Jason and me with a mortifying sense of guilt. We fled the room as if, in our fumblings, we had uncapped some virus we still might escape if we ran fast enough. Had one of the counselors not caught me scaling the fence, I felt certain I could have made it back to Raleigh by morning, skittering across the surface of the ocean like one of those lizards often featured on television wildlife programs."

"It occurred to me that everything we buy has been poked or packaged by some unfortunate nitwit with a hairnet and a wad of cotton stuffed into his ears. Every ear of corn, every chocolate-coated raisin or shoelace. Every barbeque tong, paper hat, and store-bought mitten arrives with a history of abject misery. Vegetarians look at a pork roast thinking about the animal. I'd now look at them wondering whose job it was to package the shallow Styrofoam trays."

"Because I was lazy, I'd adopted the philosophy that things just happen."

"that's the beauty of an art school: as long as you can pay the tuition, they will never, even in the gentlest way, suggest that you have no talent."

"My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for who I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions of people who hate you for what you are and you're likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks. I haven't got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out."

"'If I had one wish, I'd wish for an unlimited amount of wishes,' I said. She shook her head in a way that suggested she had heard this answer countless times before. 'Don't get greedy on me, Dave, you only get one wish.'"

"'It is ironic that nudists are just about the last people you'd ever want to see naked."

"They were nothing like the French people I had imagined. If anything, they were too kind, too generous and too knowledgeable in the fields of plumbing and electricity."

"on genders of nouns: Why refer to Lady Crack Pipe or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?"

"After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of the these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations."

"For the first twenty years of my life I rocked myself to sleep. It was a harmless enough hobby, but eventually I had to give it up. Throughout the next twenty-two years I lay still and discovered that after a few minutes I could drop off with no problem. Follow seven beers with a couple of scotches and a thimble of good marijuana, and it's funny how sleep just sort of comes on its own. Often I never even make it to bed. I'd squat down to pet the cat and wake up on the floor eight hours later, having lost a perfectly good excuse to change my clothes. I'm now told that this is not called "going to sleep" but rather "passing out," a phrase that carries a distinct hint of judgment."

"Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character."

"In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake of the children. In New York they tried to work things out for the sake of the apartment."

"If cooking is an art, I think we're in our Dada phase."

"Because I'm both a glutton and a masochist, my standard complaint, "That was so bad", is always followed by "And there was so little of it!""

"Friends always say, "How can you eat those? I read in the paper that they're made from hog's lips." "And...?" "And hearts and eyelids.""

"The word phobic has its place when properly used, but lately it's been declawed by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than loathing. No credit is given for distinguishing between these two very different emotions."

"You can't kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up a little sometimes, but you can't kill him."

"I ain't seen pussy in so long I'd throw stones at it."

"It was insulting to be told not to take too much of something you didn't really want in the first place."

"My mother and I were at the dry cleaner's, standing behind a woman we had never seen. "My sister and I are visiting from out of town," the woman said, a little louder now, and again the man nodded. "I'd love to stay awhile longer and explore, but my home—well, one of my homes—is on the garden tour, so I've got to get back to Williamsburg." "My home—well, one of my homes": by the end of the day my mother and I had repeated this line no less than fifty times. You had to get it just right, or else the sentence lost its power. The first dozen times we tried it, our voices sounded pinched and snobbish, but by midafternoon they had softened. "My home—well, one of my homes . . ." My mother said it in a rush, as if she were under pressure to be more specific."

"In the coming years our father would continue to promise what he couldn't deliver, and in time we grew to think of him as an actor auditioning for the role of a benevolent millionaire. He'd never get the part but liked the way the words felt in his mouth."

"My sister Lisa had an apartment over by the university and said that I could come stay with her as long as I didn't bring my Joni Mitchell record. My mother offered to drive me over, and after a few bong hits I took her up on it. It was a fifteen-minute trip across town, and on the way we listened to the rebroadcast of a radio call-in show in which people phoned the host to describe the various birds gathered around their backyard feeders. Normally the show came on in the morning, and it seemed strange to listen to it at night. The birds in question had gone to bed hours ago and probably had no idea they were still being talked about."

""Cut corners and it'll always come back to bite you in the ass." That was one of her sayings."

"Her face was like the weather in one of those places with no discernible seasons."

"I never went into their apartment, but what I saw from the door was pretty rough - not simply messy or chaotic, but hopeless, the lair of a depressed person."

"It wouldn't have made any difference," my mother said. "A woman like that, the way she sees it she's a victim. Everyone against her, no matter what."

"She's afraid to tell me anything important, knowing I'll only turn around and write about it. In my mind, I'm like a friendly junkman, building things from the little pieces of scrap I find here and there, but my family's started to see things differently. Their personal lives are the so-called pieces of scrap I so casually pick up, and they're sick of it. More and more often their stories begin with the line "You have to swear you will never repeat this." I always promise, but it's generally understood that my word means nothing."

"Sometimes when you're stoned it's fun to sit around and think of who might play you in the movie version of your life. What makes it fun is that no one is actually going to make a movie of your life. I'd worried that, in making the movie, the director might get me and my family wrong, but now a worse thought occurred to me: What if he got us right?"

"What really interests me are the local gun laws. Can I carry a concealed weapon and, if so, under what circumstances? What's the waiting period for a tommy gun? Could I buy a Glock 17 if I were recently divorced or fired from my job?"

"He took a sip of my father's weak coffee and spit it back into the mug. "This shit's like making love in a canoe." "Excuse me?" "It's fucking near water.""

"My problem was that I already loved an apartment. The one we had was perfect, and searching for another left me feeling faithless and sneaky, as if I were committing adultery. After a viewing, I'd stand in our living room, looking up at the high, beamed ceiling and trying to explain that the other two-bedroom had meant nothing to me."

"If finding an apartment is like falling in love, buying one is like proposing on your first date and agreeing not to see each other until the wedding."

"I can't seem to fathom that the things important to me are not important to other people as well, and so I come off sounding like a missionary, someone whose job it is to convert rather than listen."

"Talk like this [i.e. by companions at a diner] can go on for hours, and while you do have to accept it, you don't have to actually pay attention. I stared straight ahead, watching a broken-nosed cook top a hamburger with cheese, and then I turned slightly to my left and began listening to the two men seated on the other side of me. There was about them the weariness of people who could not afford to retire and would keep on toiling, horselike, until they dropped. The man beside me wore a T-shirt endorsing the state of Florida, and as if the weather were completely different on the other side of the ketchup bottle, the man beside him wore a thick wool sweater and heavy corduroy pants. "Did you read about those worms?" he asked. He was referring to the can of nematodes—tiny worms—recently discovered on the Texas plains. They'd been sent up with the doomed space shuttle and had somehow managed to survive the explosion. While I'd been listening to my neighbors, Anne had ordered me a slice of pie, and as I picked up my fork she told me that I was supposed to eat it backward, starting with the outer crust and working my way inward. "Your last bite should be the point, and you're supposed to make a wish on it," she said. "Hasn't anyone ever told you that?" As Anne and Hugh resumed their conversation, I thought of all the pie I had eaten during the course of my life, and wondered how different things might be if only I had wished upon the points."

"I thought I'd get a coffee and take it outdoors, but just as I approached, a boy swooped in and began mixing himself a cup of hot chocolate. It was a complicated business, mixing a cup of hot chocolate. You had to spread the powdered cocoa from one end of the table to the other and use as many stirrers as possible, making sure to thoroughly chew the wetted ends before tossing them upon the stack of unused napkins. This is what I like about children: complete attention to one detail and complete disregard of another."

"... name association was big, as were my presumed interests in vaudeville and politics. In St. Louis the Bow tie was characterized as "very Charlie McCarthy", while in Chicago a young man defined it as "the pierced eyebrow of the Republican party"."

"Our artwork did not hang on the refrigerator or anywhere near it, because our parents recognised it for what it was: crap."

"My dad was like the Marine Corps, only instead of tearing you to pieces and then putting you back together, he just did the first part and called it a day. I'm sure my father said plenty of normal things to me when I was growing up, but what stuck, probably because he said it, like, ten thousand times, was "Everything you touch turns to crap." His other catchphrase was "You know what you are? A big fat zero.""

"I laid my hand over hers on the desktop and then looked down at it, thinking what a great poster this would make. "Togetherness," it might read. I'd expected electricity to pass mutually between us, but all I really felt was self-conscious, and disappointed that more people weren't looking on."

"People had their places, and to not understand that, to act in violation of it, demoted you from a nature nut to something even lower, a complete untouchable, basically."

"In the beginning, I was put off by the harshness of German. Someone would order a piece of cake, and it sounded as if it were an actual order, like, "Cut the cake and lie facedown in that ditch between the cobbler and the little girl." I'm guessing this comes from having watched too many Second World War movies."

"Gambling to me is what a telephone pole might be to a groundhog. He sees that it's there but doesn't for the life of him understand why. Friends have tried to explain the appeal, but still I don't get it. Why take chances with money?"

""Look at us," he said, and he let out a long sigh. "A couple of first-class fucking losers." I wanted to defend myself, to at least point out that we were in second class."

"In 2004, I offered priority signing to smokers, the reason being that, because they didn't have as long to live, their time was more valuable. Four years later my special treatment was reserved for men who stood five-foot-six and under. "That's right, my little friends," I announced. "There'll be no waiting in line for you." It seemed unfair to restrict myself to men, so I included any woman with braces on her teeth. "What about us?" asked the pregnant and the lame. And because it was my show, I told them to wait their fucking turn."

"But then my focus shifts and I find myself staring. I should be used to the way Americans dress when traveling, yet it still manages to amaze me. It's as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge saying, "Fuck this. I'm going to Los Angeles!""

"Then again, even if I were informed, what's the likelihood of changing anyone's opinion, especially a couple of strangers? If my own little mind is nailed shut, why wouldn't theirs be?"

"A person doesn't consciously choose what he focuses on. Those things choose you, and, once they do, nothing, it seems, can shake them."

"My trip reminded me that we are all just animals, that stuff comes out of every hole we have, no matter where we live or how much money we've got. On some level we all know this and manage, quite pleasantly, to shove it towards the back of our minds."

"While talking, Mrs Dunston rummaged through her tremendous purse. Her wallet was eventually located, but then it seemed that the register was locked, so the best solution was to put the coffees on her bill. That's how I discovered her name and her room number: 302. My only question then was what time I should arrange her wake-up call for. Let's see how chatty you feel at four a.m., I thought."

"It doesn't take many people to muck up a roadside. A devoted handful can do the trick. One of the things I find repeatedly is a plastic Diet Coke bottle containing a meticulously folded Mars bar wrapper. I imagine this is someone's after-work snack and that by putting the wrapper inside the empty bottle, the person feels he's done his bit. And though he has turned two pieces of trash into one, until he learns to keep it in his car, I don't think he's entitled to pat himself on the back."

"It's not lost on me that I'm so busy recording life, I don't have time to really live it."

"Another old-fashioned practice I maintain is carrying a notebook, a small one I keep in my shirt pocket and never leave the house without. In it I register all the little things that strike me, not in great detail but just quickly. The following morning I'll review what I jotted down and look for the most meaningful moment in the previous day, the one in which I felt truly present. It's worth mentioning that this is my edit. It wasn't easy revisiting what are now 156 volumes of my diary."

"If you talk to people, you can have whatever you want."

"It's fun to see where people live."

"Dad on friendship: "Sure, some people are nice. Real nice. Nice like carpets so you can walk all over them.""

"Later I went to the design school and saw Kumar and Melamid, the Soviet dissident artists, who are funny. I sold them my soul for $1."

"After coming home, I listened to the radio and cleaned up a little. A woman on All Things Considered wrote a book of advice called If You Want to Write and mentioned the importance of keeping a diary. It was valuable, she said, because after a while you'd stop being forced and pretentious and become honest and unafraid of your thoughts."

"Amy, Tiffany and I sat in the kitchen and talked until three thirty this morning. One of the things we laughed about was an old episode of The Newlywed Game. The host asked the wives, "What's the most exotic place you've ever made love?" He was likely expecting "The kitchen" or "On a tennis court at night," but one woman didn't quite understand the question and answered, "In the butt.""

"Delinquent style is timeless. Real trouble doesn't walk around with a ponytail. It doesn't have a Mohawk or special shoelace patterns. Real trouble has a bad complexion and a Windbreaker."

"Adrienne started teaching a few months ago in Denver and wrote that it leaves you with a constant feeling of deceiving people. That you know nothing they don't, or couldn't learn on their own if they cared to."

"Something has changed, and now, when I look at my students, I see only people who are going to eat up my time."

"Dad doesn't pay attention when you talk to him, so Paul's taken to throwing the term IRS into his sentences. Then it's suddenly: "Hold on a second, what did you say?""

"Walking down 8th Avenue, I fell in behind two muscled gym queens. When a car alarm went off, one of them turned to the other, saying, "That's the Puerto Rican national anthem." "Really?" the other guy said. "That's actually their anthem?""

"Someone stopped Mitch on the street last night and said, "I need another seventy-five cents so I can buy a cheeseburger. How about helping me?" Mitch said, "Get it without the cheese," and continued walking."

"I'm finding it progressively more difficult to have my picture taken, especially now, when there always has to be a gimmick. The idea is that you have to be humiliated in order for your personality to shine through. You need to hang from the ceiling by a hook or crawl on your hands and knees through a puddle of something."

"The inevitable finally happened, just as I knew it would."

"Harry Rowohlt, the fellow who translated my book into German and is reading with me on my tour, told me that when someone on the bus or at a nearby table in a restaurant talks on a cell phone, he likes to lean over and shout, "Come back to bed, I'm freezing.""

"In 1976 Dawn Erickson taught me that, in order to ensure good luck, you're supposed to say, "Rabbit, rabbit," on the first day of every month. It has to be the very first thing that comes out of your mouth and you have to say it out loud or else it doesn't work. I'd never been particularly superstitious, but ever since she told me, I've made it a point to follow her example."

"On Wednesday my watch broke, so yesterday I went across the street to the saddest mall in America. Half the stores were shuttered up and the fountain had been drained. The food court was gone except for a place called Granny's Fudgery, a wooden cart surrounded by card tables. I imagine the mall started going downhill when it accepted Walmart as a tenant. Anything you could find at Bill's Card Shop and the Record Bin could also be found there, where a customer could pay less and buy everything in one shot. I'd been to only one Walmart in my life before this and I was shocked at how ugly it was, even by American standards. It was a mammoth jumble of absolute shit made more chaotic by brightly colored signs and promotional displays. Yesterday's Walmart was even worse than the first, but the employees were incredibly friendly."

"On several occasions during my visit, she referred to herself as poor, and that depressed me. Most people would say they're broke. That word suggests a temporary setback. Poor, on the other hand, conveys a permanence."

"In first class, you count on your fellow passengers to make you feel good about yourself. You're supposed to look around with pride, telling yourself that these are your kind of people."

"Someone in the back of the room started singing "God Bless America." The thing about "God Bless America" is that, after a certain point, nobody really knows the words. There's always a weird mumbling that follows "Stand beside her and guide her," and lasts until "From the mountains to the prairies.""

"Honestly, though, does choice ever come into it? Is it my fault that the good times fade to nothing while the bad ones burn forever bright? Memory aside, the negative just makes for a better story: the plane was delayed, an infection set in, outlaws arrived and reduced the schoolhouse to ashes. Happiness is harder to put into words. It's also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I've begged them to leave."

"Increasingly at Southern airports, instead of a "good-bye" or "thank-you," cashiers are apt to say, "Have a blessed day." This can make you feel like you've been sprayed against your will with God cologne. "Get off me!" I always want to scream. "Quick, before I start wearing ties with short-sleeved shirts!" As a business traveller, you'll likely be met at your destination by someone who asks, "So, how was your flight?" This, as if there are interesting variations and you might answer, "The live orchestra was a nice touch," or "The first half was great, but then they let a baby take over the controls and it got all bumpy." In fact, there are only two kinds of flights: ones in which you die and ones in which you do not."

"After the desk clerk hands you your key, the bellman will grab your suitcase and ask, "So where are you coming in from today?" Like everyone else at the hotel, he doesn't really listen to your answer. His words are just a hook to hang a tip on. You could say you're from a town ten miles down the road or from another dimension. Either way, you get the same response: "You're a long way from home, aren't you?""

"The following morning you'll wander to the hotel breakfast room and tell the hostess that there is only one in your party. She'll pick up a menu and lead you to your table, asking, "And how is your day going so far?" "You mean the last twelve minutes?" you'll ask. "OK, I guess." And she'll say, "Awesome.""

"Should you wander into a shop during your visit to the United States, you can expect a clerk to ask, "So what are we up to today?" "We," as if the two of you had made plans you forgot about. "Oh," I usually say, already sorry I walked in, "I'm just looking around." "Awesome." If you purchase something, you'll be asked at the register what you're going to do with the rest of your afternoon. "Umm, I don't know. Buy more shit?""

"Stay safe," a Starbucks employee said to me one morning. I was in a hurry to get to my gate, so didn't stop to ask, "Safe from what?"

"Whenever I see a young woman boarding a plane in her pyjamas, or a guy in a T-shirt that reads your hole is my goal, I always wonder what Mom would think."

"Genius is often only the power of making continuous efforts. The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it — so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it. How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience, would have achieved success. As the tide goes clear out, so it comes clear in. In business sometimes prospects may seem darkest when really they are on the turn. A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success. There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose."

"Most Authors cringe and flatter and Fish for compliments. If they fail to get Applause, they say the World is a Scurvy Place and those who dwell therein a Dirty Lot: if they succeed, they give thanks to Nobody, saying they got only what their Meritt entitles them to. But I rather like the World. The Flesh is pleasing and the Devil does not trouble me."

"Every man should have a college education in order to show him how little the thing is really worth. The intellectual kings of the earth have seldom been college-bred."

"There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability. The sternest comment that can be made against employers as a class lies in the fact that men of Ability usually succeed in showing their worth in spite of their employer, and not with his assistance and encouragement."

"Never explain — your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyhow."

"Freedom cannot be bestowed — it must be achieved."

"Life is just one damn thing after another."

"Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed."

"It is not to be wondered that men have worshiped the ocean, for in his depths they have seen mirrored the image of Eternity — of Infinity. Here they have seen the symbol of God's great plan of oneness with His creatures, for the sea is the union of all infinite particles, and it takes the whole to make the one."

"Anyone who idolizes you is going to hate you when he discovers that you are fallible. He never forgives. He has deceived himself, and he blames you for it."

"Do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing, and you'll never be criticized."

"Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them."

"He picked up the lemons that Fate had sent him and started a lemonade-stand."

"If you want work well done, select a busy man ‚ the other kind has no time."

"Some one has said that we are moving so fast that when plans are being made to perform some great feat, these plans are broken into by a youth who enters and says, "I have done it.""

"Philosophy rests on a proposition that whatever is is right. Preaching begins by assuming that whatever is is wrong."

"The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without."

"Piety is the tinfoil of pretense."

"The point I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter & did not ask, "Where is he at?" By the Eternal! there is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing — "Carry a message to Garcia!""

"If men will not act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is for all?"

"Have I put the matter too strongly? Possibly I have; but when all the world has gone a-slumming I wish to speak a word of sympathy for the man who succeeds — the man who, against great odds, has directed the efforts of others, and having succeeded, finds there's nothing in it: nothing but bare board and clothes. I have carried a dinner pail and worked for day's wages, and I have also been an employer of labor, and I know there is something to be said on both sides. There is no excellence, per se, in poverty; rags are no recommendation; and all employers are not rapacious and high-handed, any more than all poor men are virtuous. My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the "boss" is away, as well as when he is at home. And the man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets "laid off" nor has to go on a strike for higher wages."

"Civilization is one long anxious search for just such individuals. Anything such a man asks shall be granted. He is wanted in every city, town and village — in every office, shop, store and factory. The world cries out for such: he is needed and needed badly — the man who can "Carry a Message to Garcia.""

"I believe in the Motherhood of God. I believe in the Blessed Trinity of Father, Mother and Child. I believe that God is here, and that we are as near Him now as ever we shall be. I do not believe He started this world a-going and went away and left it to run by itself. I believe in the sacredness of the human body, this transient dwelling place of a living soul, And so I deem it the duty of every man and every woman to keep his or her body beautiful through right thinking and right living. I believe that the love of man for woman, and the love of woman for man is holy; And that this love in all its promptings is as much an emanation of the Divine Spirit as man's love for God, or the most daring hazards of the human mind. I believe in salvation through economic, social, and spiritual freedom. I believe John Ruskin, William Morris, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Leo Tolstoy to be Prophets of God, who should rank in mental reach and spiritual insight with Elijah, Hosea, Ezekiel, and Isaiah. I believe that men are inspired to-day as much as ever men were. I believe we are now living in Eternity as much as ever we shall. I believe that the best way to prepare for a Future Life is to be kind, live one day at a time, and do the work you can do best, doing it as well as you can. I believe we should remember the Week-day, to keep it holy. I believe there is no devil but fear. I believe that no one can harm you but yourself. I believe in my own divinity — and yours. I believe that we are all sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. I believe the only way we can reach the Kingdom of Heaven is to have the Kingdom of Heaven in our hearts. I believe in every man minding his own business. I believe in sunshine, fresh air, friendship, calm sleep, beautiful thoughts. I believe in the paradox of success through failure. I believe in the purifying process of sorrow, and I believe that death is a manifestation of life. I believe the Universe is planned for good. I believe it is possible that I shall make other creeds, and change this one, or add to it, from time to time, as new light may come to me."

"I AM an Anarchist. All good men are Anarchists. All cultured, kindly men; all gentlemen; all just men are Anarchists. Jesus was an Anarchist. A Monarchist is one who believes a monarch should govern. A Plutocrat believes in the rule of the rich. A Democrat holds that the majority should dictate. An Aristocrat thinks only the wise should decide; while an Anarchist does not believe in government at all. Richard Croker is a Monarchist; Mark Hanna a Plutocrat; Cleveland a Democrat; Cabot Lodge an Aristocrat; William Penn, Henry D. Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and Walt Whitman were Anarchists. An Anarchist is one who minds his own business. An Anarchist does not believe in sending warships across wide oceans to kill brown men, and lay waste rice fields, and burn the homes of people who are fighting for liberty. An Anarchist does not drive women with babes at their breasts and other women with babes unborn, children and old men into the jungle to be devoured by beasts or fever or fear, or die of hunger, homeless, unhouseled and undone. Destruction, violence, ravages, murder, are perpetrated by statute law."

"I believe that brutality tends to defeat itself. Prizefighters die young, gourmands get the gout, hate hurts worse the man who nurses it, and all selfishness robs the mind of its divine insight, and cheats the soul that would know. Mind alone is eternal. He, watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps. My faith is great: out of the transient darkness of the present the shadows will flee away, and Day will yet dawn. I am an Anarchist."

"No man who believes in force and violence is an Anarchist. The true Anarchist decries all influences save those of love and reason. Ideas are his only arms. Being an Anarchist I am also a Socialist. Socialism is the antithesis of Anarchy. One is the North Pole of Truth, the other the South. The Socialist believes in working for the good of all, while Anarchy is pure Individualism. I believe in every man working for the good of self; and in working for the good of self, he works for the good of all. To think, to see, to feel, to know; to deal justly; to bear all patiently; to act quietly; to speak cheerfully; to moderate one's voice — these things will bring you the highest good. They will bring you the love of the best, and the esteem of that Sacred Few, whose good opinion alone is worth cultivating. And further than this, it is the best way you can serve Society — live your life. The wise way to benefit humanity is to attend to your own affairs, and thus give other people an opportunity to look after theirs. If there is any better way to teach virtue than by practicing it, I do not know it. Would you make men better — set them an example. The millenium will never come until governments cease from governing, and the meddler is at rest. Politicians are men who volunteer the task of governing us, for a consideration. The political boss is intent on living off your labor. A man may seek an office in order to do away with the rascal who now occupies it, but for the most part office-seekers are rank rogues. Shakespeare used the word politician five times, and each time it is synonymous with knave. That is to say, a politician is one who sacrifices truth and honor for policy. The highest motive of his life is expediency — policy. In King Lear it is the "scurvy politician," who through tattered clothes beholds small vices, while robes and furred gowns, for him, covers all."

"Mankind is governed by the worst — the strongest example of this is to be seen in American municipalities, but it is true of every government. We are governed by rogues who hold their grip upon us by and through statute law. Were it not for law the people could protect themselves against these thieves, but now we are powerless and are robbed legally. One mild form of coercion these rogues resort to is to call us unpatriotic when we speak the truth about them. Not long ago they would have cut off our heads. The world moves. Governments cannot be done away with instantaneously, but progress will come, as it has in the past by lessening the number of laws. We want less governing, and the ideal government will arrive when there is no government at all. So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs. So long as men are clubbed, robbed, imprisoned, disgraced, hanged by the governing class, just so long will the idea of violence and brutality be born in the souls of men."

"It takes brains to make money, but any dam fool can inherit. P.S.: I never inherited any money."

"The happiest mortals on earth are ladies who have been bereaved by the loss of their husbands."

"The sad thing about the optimist is his state of mind concerning himself."

"Literary people of the opposite sex do not really love each other. All they really desire is to read their manuscript aloud to a receptive listener."

"If men could only know each other, they would never either idolize or hate."

"Too often the reformer has been one who caused the rich to band themselves against the poor."

"And the worst part about making a soldier of a man is not that a soldier kills brown men or white men, but that the soldier loses his own soul."

"Good people are only half as good, and bad people only half as bad, as other people regard them."

"If we ever damned it will not be because we have loved too much, but because we have loved too little."

"Every spirit makes his own house, but as afterwards the house confines its spirit, you had better build well."

""Should we have an Eleventh Commandment?" asked a youth of the Greatest Living Actress. "Most assuredly, no - we have ten too many now!" answered the divine Sara."

"Knowledge is the distilled essence of our intuitions, corroborated by experience."

"I believe more in the goodness of bad people than i do in the badness of good people."

"A Miracle: An event described by those to whom it was told by men who did not see it."

"Life is a compromise between fate and free will."

"It is the weak man who urges compromise—never the strong man."

"Do not take life too seriously – you will never get out of it alive."

"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man."

"There have always existed three ways of keeping the people loving and loyal. One is to leave them alone, to trust them and not to interfere. This plan, however, has very seldom been practised, because the politicians regard the public as a cow to be milked, and something must be done to make it stand quiet. So they try Plan Number Two, which consists in hypnotizing the public by means of shows, festivals, parades, prizes and many paid speeches, sermons and editorials, wherein and whereby the public is told how much is being done for it, and how fortunate it is in being protected and wisely cared for by its divinely appointed guardians. Then the band strikes up, the flags are waved, three passes are made, one to the right and two to the left; and we, being completely under the hypnosis, hurrah ourselves hoarse. Plan Number Three is a very ancient one and is always held back to be used in case Number Two fails. It is for the benefit of the people who do not pass readily under hypnotic control. If there are too many of these, they have been known to pluck up courage and answer back to the speeches, sermons and editorials. Sometimes they refuse to hurrah when the bass-drum plays, in which case they have occasionally been arrested for contumacy and contravention by stocky men, in wide-awake hats, who lead the strenuous life. This Plan Number Three provides for an armed force that shall overawe, if necessary, all who are not hypnotized. The army is used for two purposes — to coerce disturbers at home, and to get up a war at a distance, and thus distract attention from the troubles near at hand. Napoleon used to say that the only sure cure for internal dissension was a foreign war: this would draw the disturbers away, on the plea of patriotism, so they would win enough outside loot to satisfy them, or else they would all get killed, it really didn't matter much; and as for loot, if it was taken from foreigners, there was no sin. A careful analyst might here say that Plan Number Three is only a variation of Plan Number Two — the end being gained by hypnotic effects in either event, for the army is conscripted from the people to use against the people, just as you turn steam from a boiler into the fire-box to increase the draft. ..."

"Experience is the name everyone gives to his mistakes."

"Wealth: A cunning device of Fate whereby men are made captive, and burdened with responsibilites from which only Death can file their fetters."

"A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience."

"An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all."

"If your religion does not change you, then you had better change your religion."

"Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes a day. Wisdom consists of not exceeding the limit."

"If you err it is not for me to punish you. We are punished by our sins not for them."

"It is only life and love that give love and life."

"Young women with ambitions should be very crafty and cautious, lest mayhap they be caught in the soft, silken mesh of a happy marriage, and go down to oblivion, dead to the world."

"I have no perfect panacea for human ills. And even if I had I would not attempt to present a system of philosophy between the soup and fish, but this much I will say: The distinctively modern custom of marital bundling is the doom of chivalry and death of passion. It wears all tender sentiment to a napless warp, and no wonder is it that the novelist, without he has a seared and bitter heart, hesitates to follow the couple beyond the church door. There is no greater reproach to our civilization than the sight of men joking the boy whose heart is pierced by the first rays of a life-giving sun, or of our expecting a girl to blush because she is twice God's child today she was yesterday."

"The great Big Black Things that have loomed against the horizon of my life, threatening to devour me, simply loomed and nothing more. The things that have really made me miss my train have always been sweet, soft, pretty, pleasant things of which I was not in the least afraid."

"To supply a thought is mental massage; but to evolve a thought of your own is an achievement. Thinking is a brain exercise — and no faculty grows save as it is exercised."

"Do not go out of your way to do good whenever it comes your way. Men who make a business of doing good to others are apt to hate others in the same occupation. Simply be filled with the thought of good, and it will radiate — you do not have to bother about it, any more than you need trouble about your digestion."

"Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you."

"The newspapers print what the people want, and thus does the savage still swing his club and flourish his spear."

"I am not sure just what the unpardonable sin is, but I believe it is a disposition to evade the payment of small bills."

"Do not dump your woes upon people — keep the sad story of your life to yourself. Troubles grow by recounting them."

"Men who marry for gratification, propagation or the matter of buttons or socks, must expect to cope with and deal in a certain amount of quibble, subterfuge, concealments, and double, deep-dyed prevarication."

"When you see a tomcat with his whiskers full of feathers, do not say "Canary!" — he'll take offense."

"Academic education is the act of memorizing things read in books, and things told by college professors who got their education mostly by memorizing things read in books."

"Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter's colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments."

"The weaknesses of the many make the leader possible—and the man who craves disciples and wants followers is always more or less of a charlatan. The man of genuine worth and insight wants to be himself; and he wants others to be themselves, also. Discipleship is a degenerating process to all parties concerned. People who are able to do their own thinking should not allow others to do it for them."

"A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist."

"Life without absorbing occupation is hell — joy consists in forgetting life."

"Making men live in three worlds at once — past, present and future has been the chief harm organized religion has done."

"Our admiration is so given to dead martyrs that we have little time for living heroes."

"Perfume; Any smell that is used to drown a worse one."

"Respectability is the dickey on the bosom of civilization."

"There is no such thing as success in a bad business."

"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one."

"The ineffable joy of forgiving and being forgiven forms an ecstasy that might well arouse the envy of the gods."

"The way to learn to earn a living is to go at it and earn a living."

"To remain on earth you must be useful, otherwise Nature regards you as old metal, and is only watching for a chance to melt you over."

"Why not be a top-notcher? A top-notcher is simply an individual who works for the institution of which he is a part, not against it."

"Woman's inaptitude for reasoning has not prevented her from arriving at truth; nor has man's ability to reason prevented him from floundering in absurdity."

"A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you."

"No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one."

"I can not say specifically where your father and Mrs. Hubbard were when the torpedoes hit, but I can tell you just what happened after that. They emerged from their room, which was on the port side of the vessel, and came on to the boat-deck. Neither appeared perturbed in the least. Your father and Mrs. Hubbard linked arms — the fashion in which they always walked the deck — and stood apparently wondering what to do. I passed him with a baby which I was taking to a lifeboat when he said, "Well, Jack, they have got us. They are a damn sight worse than I ever thought they were." They did not move very far away from where they originally stood. As I moved to the other side of the ship, in preparation for a jump when the right moment came, I called to him, "What are you going to do?" and he just shook his head, while Mrs. Hubbard smiled and said, "There does not seem to be anything to do." The expression seemed to produce action on the part of your father, for then he did one of the most dramatic things I ever saw done. He simply turned with Mrs. Hubbard and entered a room on the top deck, the door of which was open, and closed it behind him. It was apparent that his idea was that they should die together, and not risk being parted on going into the water."

"I think of what Elbert Hubbard said. It struck me rather strangely the other day. He said: "If you are going to reform the world you had better begin with yourself, and there will be one rogue less in the world." Of course, I did not want to apply that to myself, but I would not object to applying it to you."

"What egotism, what stupid vanity, to suppose that a thing could not happen because you could not conceive it!"

"There is no advance without strife."

"The waiters all are rude. The bellboys scream and yell. The swill is better than the food. Goddamn the Mills Hotel."

"But we are as other men, exactly. Of one blood, one species, one brain, one figure, one fundamental set of collective instincts, one solitary body of information, one everything. Superiority and inferiority are individual, not racial or national."

"Absolute dominion of a powerful people by a minority always produces national aggression."

"The blame for Armageddon lies on man. And the millennium will come only when the average man exhibits a scientific integrity about all he is and does — instead of half of it. Many a psychological Archimedes has put signposts on the hard road man must follow if he is to avoid self-destruction and come into his own. A few very great modern scientists have added to the lore. Indications of what man may expect of himself are everywhere at hand. But most men must first be persuaded that the task lies ahead and not behind — that we are infants still, with loaded guns for toys."

"Ignorance is not bliss — it is oblivion. Determined ignorance is the hastiest kind of oblivion."

"The church has stood, a rock colossus of bigotry, in the path of ten thousand proposed reforms. Sane efforts to legalize birth control information, the manufacture of proper birth control appliances, appliances for the inhibition of the spread of venereal disease, public instruction in sex hygiene, free clinics for the treatment of venereal disease, the inspection and treatment of prostitutes, controlled prostitution itself, the publication of psychological and physical sex information, aid for unwed mothers—myriad attempts by sane men acting sanely on real problems — have been fought down by church-frightened legislatures and church-dominated courts."

"Few men, indeed, are so mad that they do not know when they are doing wrong. But so avid is their pursuit of goods that wrongdoing has become an element of all they do. To protest that fact is idle. Our politics, our business — little and big, our professions, our labor, are smitten in every facet with a corruption occasioned by reckless determination to make not just a reasonable profit but all the profit that can be wrung from every enterprise. Our commonest man, emulating his superiors, forges ahead with a brick on the safety valve of his conscience. Think over your morning paper in that light."

"Common man has at long last got himself so far out of gear with nature and his environment that he is beginning to see the shape of extinction, whether he recognizes it as such or not."

"There are in America from fifteen to twenty million religious fundamentalists who are dedicated to doctrines incompatible with democracy in that they insist on their prerogatives as first principles. An even larger group feebly follows the trail of fire breathed by those fundamentalists. They are the most dangerous minority we have because they categorically eschew the reasoned judgments of the majority. Democracy properly allows them the right to worship as they choose. It should never have conceded them the right to establish schools. Education is not a function of any church — or even of a city — or a state; it is a function of all mankind."

"For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane."

"I think visual literacy and media literacy is not without value, but I think plain old-fashioned text literacy and mathematical literacy are much more powerful and flexible ways to organize your mind."

"The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different."

"I can never get past the structural similarities between the Singularity prediction and the apocalypse of St. John the Divine. The key thing they have in common is the idea of a rapture, in which some chosen humans will be taken up and made one with the infinite while others will be left behind...[loosely paraphrasing Jaron Lanier] while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit. And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware's nothing more than a really complicated space heater."

"Slashdot reader: In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win? Stephenson: You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation...The first time was a year or two after Snow Crash came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake...I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us...The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while...The second time, when Gibson came through Seattle on his Idoru tour, he devastated my quarter of the city...As a stalemate developed we began to resort more and more to the use of pure energy, modulated by Red Lotus incantations of the third Sung group..."

"I dreamed up the Snow Crash world 15 years ago as a thought experiment, and I tweaked it to be as funny and outrageous and graphic novel like as I could make it. Such a world wouldn't be stable unless each little "burbclave" had the ability to defend itself from all external threats. This is not plausible, barring some huge advances in defensive technology."

"So I'm well aware that there are certain people frustrated with the endings of my books. I can remember at the time I was writing it, I told a friend of mine that the climax of Snow Crash was now longer than Moby-Dick: There's a helicopter that gets brought down; there's a private jet that blows up; some people die; there's confrontation and a girl goes home with her mom — so it seems like a good ending to me. [audience laughter] Once you write a book or two with controversial endings — and that meme gets going, of “Stephenson can’t write endings” — then that gets slapped on everything that you do no matter how elaborate the ending is. I think Anathem does OK on that score. I'm sure that I'll be hearing from some of the “Stephenson can’t write endings” people, but I think that it has a decent enough ending."

"As far as culture and politics are concerned, the important theme is long-attention-span vs. short-attention-span thinking. I'm sure that your readers can think of any number of ways in which having a longer attention span can be useful. But I'll name one. Bankers with long attention spans don't lend money to people who can't pay it back. If we had more bankers who adopted a long-term view of their responsibilities, we might not be in the middle of a financial crisis that is blowing away 150-year-old investment banks."

"Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done."

"I wanted to create an interesting scifi universe that didn't violate the laws of physics, and that means that you're limited to staying inside the solar system. I also wanted to get away from the ship-centric style of science fiction. Star Trek is ship-centric and it's all about the Enterprise — there are many other examples. What if we decided to get away from the obsession with ships and instead thought about big machines and structures that might be used to create a civilization inside the solar system?"

"Now, at the little southern black college where I went to school, we had no megadorms. We were cool at the right times and academic at the right times .... Boston University, where I did my Master's ... most students had no time for sonic war, and the rest vented their humors in the city, not in the dorms. Ohio State was nicely spread out, and I lived in an apartment complex where noisy shit-for-brains undergrads were even less welcome than tweedy black bachelors."

"This is a history, in that it intends to describe what happened and suggest why. ... I may have fooled around with a few facts. But I served as witness until as close to the end as anyone could have ... and so there is not so much art in this as to make it irrelevant."

"What you are about to read is not an aberration: it can happen in your local university too. The Big U, simply, was a few years ahead of the rest."

"What people do isn't determined by where they live. It happens to be their damned fault. They decided to watch TV instead of thinking when they were in high school. They decided to blow-off courses and drink beer instead of reading and trying to learn something. They decided to chicken out and be intolerant bastards instead of being openminded and, finally, they decided to go along with their buddies and do things that were terribly wrong when there was no reason they had to. Anyone who hurts someone else decides to hurt them, goes out of their way to do it.... The fact that it's hard to be a good person doesn't excuse going along and being an asshole. If they can't overcome their own fear of being unusual, it's not my fault, because any idiot ought to be able to see that if he just acts reasonably and makes a point of not hurting others, he'll be happier."

"“Sangamon’s Principle,” I said. “The simpler the molecule, the better the drug. So the best drug is oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best, nitrous oxide—a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol—nine. Past that, you’re talking lots of atoms.” “So?” “Atoms are like people. Get lots of them together, never know what they’ll do.”"

"I’m not that proud of being a congenital pain in the ass. But I will take money for it."

"One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I've lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time."

"And I hadn't even told him the truth. Actually, the shit coming out of Basco's pipes was a hundred thousand times more concentrated than was legally allowed.... That kind of thing goes on all the time. But no matter how many diplomas are tacked to your wall, give people a figure like that and they'll pass you off as a flake. You can't get most people to believe how wildly the eco-laws get broken, but if I say "More than twice the legal limit," they get comfortably outraged."

"The corporations have already planted their own bombs. All we have to do is light the fuses."

"It's the ultimate Boston transportation. On land there's the Omni, but all those slow cars get in the way. There's public transit – the T — but if you're in good shape, it's usually faster to walk. Bicycles aren't bad. But on water, nothing stops you and there isn't anything important in Boston that isn't within two blocks of being wet. The Harbor and the city are interlocked like wrestling squid, tentacles of water and land snaking off everywhere, slashed with bridges or canals."

"At some point I was entitled to say that I had entered Boston Harbor, the toilet of the Northeast. By shoving the motor over to one side I could spin the Zode in tight rings and look up into the many shit-greased sphincters of the Fair Lady on the Hill, Hub of the Universe, Cradle of Crap, my hometown."

"In four years of work, I've idled my Zodiac down every one of its thousands of inlets, looked at every inch of its fractal coastline and found every single goddamned pipe that empties into it. Some of the pipes are big enough to park a car in and some are the size of your finger, but all of them have told their story to my gas chromatograph. And often it's the littlest pipes that cause the most damage. When I see a big huge pipe coming right out of a factory, I'm betting the pumpers have at least read the EPA regs. But when I find a tiny one, hidden below the waterline, sprouting from a mile-wide industrial carnival, I put on gloves before taking my sample. And sometimes the gloves melt."

"Jim and his crew of a dozen or so specialize in loud, sloppy publicity seeking.... Myself, I like the stiletto-in-the-night approach. That's partly because I'm younger, a post-Sixties type, and partly because my thing is toxics, not nukes or mammals....there are all kinds of direct, simple ways to go after toxic criminals. You just plug the pipes."

"The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their own best interests. In fact they’re constantly doing things that will eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders involve toxic chemicals that any competent chemist should know to be dangerous. They pump these things into the environment and don’t even try to protect themselves. The evidence is right there in public, almost as if they’d printed up signed confessions and sprinkled them out of airplanes. Sooner or later, someone shows up in a Zodiac and points to that evidence, and the result is devastation far worse than what a terrorist, a Boone, could manage with bombs and guns. All the old men within twenty miles who have come down with tumors become implacable enemies. All the women married to them, all the mothers of damaged children, and even those of undamaged ones. The politicians and the news media trample each other in their haste to pour hellfire down on that corporation. The transformation can happen overnight and it’s easy to bring about. You just have to show up and point your finger."

"I don’t mean the EPA, the chemical Keystone Kops. Offices full of mediocre chemists, led by the lowest bottom-feeders of all: political appointees. Expecting them to do anything controversial is like expecting a hay fever sufferer to harvest a field of ragweed. For God’s sake, they wouldn’t even admit that chlordane was dangerous. And if they don’t have the balls to take preventative measures, punitive action doesn’t even enter their minds. The laws are broken so universally that they don’t know what to do. They don’t even look for violators."

"Nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another."

"Any property that's open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it. Like the water and the air. These guys have incentive to pollute the ocean, but no reason to clean it up."

"Every large corporation has its own telephone maze, its juicy numbers and dead ends, its nickel-plated bitch queens and sugary do-gooders."

"He wanted Justice and I wanted a beer."

"Talking to cancer victims never makes me feel righteous, never vindicated. It makes me slightly ill and for some reason, guilty. If people like me would just keep our mouths shut, people like him would never suspect why they got cancer. They'd chalk it up to God or probability. They wouldn't die with hearts full of venom. It is a strange world that Industry has made. Kind of a seething toxic harbor, opening out on a blue unspoiled ocean. Most people are swimming in it, and I get to float around on the surface, on my Zodiac, announcing that they're in trouble. What I really want to do is make a difference. But I'm not sure I have, yet."

"It might interest you to know that our state is tired of being used as a chemical toilet so that people in Utah can have plastic lawn furniture." "I can't believe an assistant attorney general came right out and said that." "Well, I wouldn't say it in public."

"I was happy to avoid them. They wore the uniform of the teen nonconformist: long hair, unsuccessful mustache, black leather."

"Bartholomew was a sommelier of heavy metal. “Yeah. Not bad for a two-umlaut band. First album was so-so. Then they ran out of material—they write maybe two songs a year. Got into a black magic thing for their videos. Already passé.” “Isn’t that the whole point of heavy metal?” “Yeah. I’m the one who told you that,” he reminded me. “Heavy metal will never leave you behind.”"

"If you’re an engineer, and you’re not very bright, it’s easy to love polychlorinated biphenyls."

"[I] followed him past all the smiling secretaries, the cheery bottle-washer pushing a cartload of glassware, the unresponsive Xerox repairman, the hale-and-hearty fellow executives, blah blah blah. Being in an office just makes my skin crawl. All that good cheer. All that fine wool, the processed air, the mediocre coffee, fluorescent tubes, lipstick, new-carpet smell, the same fucking xeroxed cartoons tacked on the walls. I wanted to shout: one Far Side on the door does not an interesting person make."

"He had a sense of irony that ruled his life, made it impossible for him to use his considerable brains in any kind of serious job. Kind of like me."

"There was a white man sitting at the kitchen table, warming his hands by wrapping them around a hot cup of tea. He had kind of an oblong face, curly red hair piled on top, a close-cropped but dense red beard, shocking blue eyes that always looked wide open. He face was ruddy with the outdoors, and the way he was sitting there with that tea, he looked so calm, so centered, almost like he was in meditation. When I came in, he looked at me and smiled just a trace, without showing his teeth and I nodded back."

"“Those guys are troglodytes,” he said, “Their solution to everything is a high-powered rifle.”"

"“I always wanted to be a Secret Service agent,” he confessed. “Because then you’re the only person in the world who can knock down the president and get away with it.”"

"Heavy metal, drugs and sexual passion had dissolved her brain to a certain point where she no longer distinguished between dead and living persons."

"A good yuppie has no sense of smell."

"Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades also occurred in the 1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high tech venture capitalism is a late-20th-century California phenomenon needs to read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable projects. The only things that have changed since then are that the stakes have gotten smaller, the process more bureaucratized, and the personalities less interesting."

"Both Penang and the Internet were established basically for strategic military reasons. In both cases, what was built by the military was merely a kernel for a much vaster phenomenon that came along later. This kernel was really nothing more than a protocol, a set of rules. If you wanted to follow those rules, you could participate, otherwise you were free to go elsewhere. Because the protocol laid down a standard way for people to interact, which was clearly set out and could be understood by anyone, it attracted smart, adaptable, ambitious people from all over the place, and at a certain point it flew completely out of control and turned into something that no one had ever envisioned: something thriving, colorful, wildly diverse, essentially peaceful, and plagued only by the congestion of its own success."

"Both [Penang and the Internet] have seen many young Western men arrive here on business missions and completely lose control of their sphincters and become impediments to any kind of organized activity. Daily hired Wall because, like Daily, he is a stable family man who has his act together...and they seem to be making excellent progress toward their goal, which is to run two really expensive wires across the Malay Peninsula. They tend to be absolutely straight shooters.... Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today. On the other hand, if I had an unlimited amount of money and woke up tomorrow morning with a burning desire to see a 2,000-hole golf course erected on the surface of Mars, I would probably call men like Daily and Wall, do a handshake deal with them, send them a blank check, and not worry about it."

"The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall."

"The Victorian era was an age of superlatives and larger-than-life characters, and as far as that goes, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse fit right in: what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists...Dr. Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes."

"Whitehouse disappeared into ignominy. William Thomson ended up being knighted and later elevated to a baron by Queen Victoria. He became Lord Kelvin and eventually got an important unit of measurement, an even more important law of physics, and a refrigerator named after him."

"To the hacker, the most interesting thing about the pyramids is their business plan, which is the simplest and most effective ever devised: 1. Put a rock on top of another rock. 2. Repeat (1) until gawkers arrive. 3. Separate them from their valuables by all conceivable means."

"Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity — it is, in a word, bourgeois — and so it attracts all of the same gripes."

"It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff? Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama (except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels? It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them. It also raises the question of why Microsoft is so bad at PR, when the history of Apple demonstrates that, by writing large checks to good ad agencies, you can plant a corporate image in the minds of intelligent people that is completely at odds with reality."

"In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is trapped between thousands of miles of dead rock underfoot, and cold dead radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed, or that is too crazy and speculative to be productized just yet. Like the Earth's biosphere, the technosphere is very thin compared to what is above and what is below."

"These changes in identity and location can easily become nested inside each other, many layers deep, even if you aren't doing anything nefarious. Once you have forgotten who and where you are, the whoami command is indispensable."

"Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic."

"I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text."

"The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero. An amateur astronomer in Utah was the first person on Earth to realize that something unusual was happening. Moments earlier, he had noticed a blur flourishing in the vicinity of the Reiner Gamma formation, near the moon's equator. He assumed it was a dust cloud thrown up by a meteor strike. He pulled out his phone and blogged the event."

"She had grown tired of the pouffy floating hair of zero gravity and, after a few weeks of clamping it down with baseball caps, had figured out how to make this shorter cut work for her. The haircut had spawned terabytes of Internet commentary from men, and a few women, who apparently had nothing else to do with their time."

"The evening went fine. Doob, who had raised three children to adulthood, had figured out a long time ago that any event largely organized by elementary school teachers was likely to come off extremely well from a logistical and crowd-control standpoint."

"“Dinah,” Sparky said, “you’re indispensable.” She knew exactly what this meant, in meeting-speak: they would put her out the airlock if they could."

"Most of the people on the Cloud Ark were going to have to be women. There were other reasons for it besides just making more babies. Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time. This was controversial, as it got into fraught topics of nature vs. nurture and whether gender identity was a social construct or a genetic program. But if you bought into the idea that boys had been programmed by Darwinian selection to run around in the open chucking spears at wild animals—something that every parent who had ever raised a boy had to take seriously—then it was difficult to envision a lot of them spending their lives in tin cans."

"“We live in strange times. I’m fertile right now. I can tell. No more condoms for you, tiger."...He was already thinking about the videos he was going to make to teach his baby about calculus when he climaxed."

"So in order to accommodate the Pioneers who would begin arriving in a few weeks, the Arkitects sent up Scouts. The qualifications for being a Scout seemed to be a shocking level of physical endurance, a complete disregard for mortal danger, and some knowledge of how to exist in a space suit. All of them were Russian."

"Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child's life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad. The parents can't, and needn't, know every last little thing. They just have to accept this, be content with what they can glean on their own, and move on."

"[Luisa] knew how to use her own ignorance as an icebreaker in conversations. Izzy was full of people who were skewed toward the Asperger’s end of the social spectrum, and there was no better way to get them to start talking than to ask them a technical question."

"You could get use to anything. You got used to it and then time raced by, and before you knew it, time was up."

"It was difficult to sustain the illusion that education was of value for kids who would not live long enough to use it. They'd never take the standardized tests that they were prepping for. In a way, Amelia had said, this had led to a kind of renaissance in pedagogy. Free from the constraints of racking up high test scores or getting into colleges, students could learn for learning's sake—which was how it ought to be. The tick-tock curriculum had dissolved and been replaced by activities improvised from day to day by teachers and parents: hiking in the mountains, doing art projects about the Cloud Ark, talking with psychologists about death, reading favorite books. In one sense Amelia and her colleagues had never been more needed, never had such an opportunity to show their quality."

"“Politics,” Doob sighed. Luisa chuckled. “I hear you, sugar. I’m not gonna say you’re wrong. But I have to warn you that this is the word—‘politics’—that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.”"

"His earlier conversation with Luisa had brought home to him, however, that ignoring politics might not be the wisest long-term strategy. He might not care about politics, but politics cared about him."

"When he tried to filter out that bias and to look at the models and the data in a completely objective way, he concluded that the jury was still out. So, technical discussions of the matter tended to be unproductive, except insofar as they revealed the biases that the participants had brought into the room with them. And here was where it started to get difficult for him personally, because he couldn't understand why anyone would harbor a bias different from his own."

"Hotness was a part of the human condition and it was pointless to pretend that it did not exist."

"We did not expect to have a backup system for the rest of the universe. We can rely upon it to be cold most of the time."

"The little boy in him was crestfallen that he wasn't going on the adventure. Then he reminded himself that he was already part of the biggest adventure ever, and that, so far, it had been altogether miserable."

"We can't run this experiment a thousand times to see the range of different outcomes. We can only run it once. The human mind has trouble with situations like that. We see patterns where they don't exist, we find meaning in randomness."

"Trying to, you know, persuade others to join our side. Trying to make the other side look bad. Just like the Internet always was."

"“We can’t make the same mistake again,” Aïda said, “of fooling ourselves. Believing in shit that isn’t real.”"

"There is a process known as parthenogenesis, literally virgin birth, by which a uniparental embryo can be created out of a normal egg. It's been done with animals. The only reason no one ever did it with humans is because it seemed ethically dodgy, as well as completely unnecessary given the willingness of men to impregnate women every chance they got."

"“We need brains, is the bottom line,” Ivy said. “We’re not hunter-gatherers anymore. We’re all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn’t bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It’s our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.”"

"I have been clinically depressed for most of my life. I once used drugs to fix it. Then I stopped. I stopped because I decided they were making me stupid, and I'd rather be miserable than stupid. I am what I am."

"Kath Two was the sort of person whose caches were apt to be crammed with paper books. For her, the electronic books were an insurance policy of sorts. The four-day elevator ride might be nothing more than a prelude to further journeys, some of which might take her to places with little to no bandwidth, and nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read."

"“I hope that this assignment will not prove an inconvenience,” Doc continued. “All duty is inconvenient to a greater or lesser degree, or it would not be duty.”"

"If history was any guide, those best at violence might end up ruling over everyone else."

"He had had many conversations during his long life. Some were fascinating and stayed with him more than a century later. Others were less so. As a younger man he had tolerated those as part of the cost of doing business—a sort of tax that all people must pay in order to take part in civilized society. When he had turned one hundred, he had decided to stop paying that tax. Henceforth he would engage only in conversations that really interested him—which, with a few exceptions for close friends and family members, meant conversations with a purpose."

"As it turned out, imagining the fate of seven billion people was far less emotionally affecting than imagining the fate of one."

"It is only a certain type of mind that scorns what is known by all and treats secrets as jewels."

"The mere suggestion that it might be possible to look at a thing from more than one point of view was infuriating to these people."

"“If you show her too much favor she will be punished. If you touch her, we’re all dead,” Ty said. “Why?” Einstein asked. “Because this is one of those cultures that is psychotic about female reproductive organs.”"

"“If you are going to make first contact with an intelligent alien race,” said Cantabrigia Five, “dropping huge strip-mining robots into their homeland might not be your best move.”"

"“People who claim they are motivated by the Purpose end up behaving differently—and generally better—than people who serve other masters.” “So it is like believing in God.” “Maybe yes. But without the theology, the scripture, the pigheaded certainty.”"

"My name is Melisande Stokes and this is my story. I am writing in July 1851 (Common Era, or—let's face it—Anno Domini)...London, England. But I am not a native of this place or time. In fact, I am quite desperate to get out of here...when I'm done writing this Diachronicle, I am going to take it to the very discreet private offices of the Fugger Bank...not to be opened for more than one hundred and sixty years. The Fuggers, above all people in this world, understand the dangers of Diachronic Shear."

"I'm writing with a steel-nibbed dip pen...partly so that I could jab my thumb with it and draw blood. The brown smear across the top of this page can be tested in any twenty-first-century DNA lab...and you will know that I am a woman of your era, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century... To quote Peter Gabriel, a singer/songwriter who will be born ninety-nine years from now: This will be my testimony."

"Reader, if you don't know what a database is, rest assured that an explanation of the concept would in no way increase your enjoyment in reading this account. If you do know, you will thank me for sparing you the details."

"Young, lavishly bearded tech entrepreneurs were trudging forlornly down the hallways, laden with computers, printers, high-end coffeemakers, and foosball tables. Like digital Okies they loaded their stuff into their Scions or Ryder trucks and rumbled off into the unforgiving Boston commercial real estate market. “So you’re going to, uh, remove basically the entire floor of the conference room?” “The conference room will cease to exist. DODO is not about meetings. Not about PowerPoints.” “I never imagined otherwise.”"

"“I made it into Wikipedia,” sang Erszebet. “I’ll bet none of my enemies ever made it into Wikipedia.”"

"The next station was called simply TRAPEZOID, but I could have guessed as much from the fact that more than half the people getting on and off the train were dressed in military uniforms of one service or another...As the headquarters of the American military and presumed ground zero for any hostile military strike, the Trapezoid had, for me, always been more mythic than real...The terrorists had targeted it on 9/11, and I could see part of the memorial that had been built on the side where the plane had crashed into it."

"I began to dig into the history of the Fuggers. This was the third time in the short history of DODO that the name had unexpectedly come up. And even though they were a famous old banking family, this seemed like too many coincidences... Even with the combined resources of Harvard's library system and U.S. intelligence databases, I wasn't able to find much. The medieval part of the story has been common knowledge for centuries...In 1459 the family had produced Jacob, the seventh surviving child in a large brood...who had, to make a long story short, become the richest person in the world... By 1601 the last central authority had been Markus Fugger: a patron of arts, a history buff, a collector of old artifacts, an ancient-languages geek... [1640] Athanasius Fugger was completely absent from the historical record."

"I tried working from the other direction, getting what information I could about the modern-day organization, and working backwards. But they were discreet to the point of paranoia, running their business through a network of offshore companies registered in places like the Cayman Islands, Jersey, and the Isle of Man. They only allowed the Fugger name to break the surface when it was to their tactical advantage, as when trying to hire employees for of their humanitarian NGOs."

"In layperson's terms: if it has to be dunked in liquid helium to work, I don't understand it. If it's in a rack with fans blowing on it, that's a different story."

"IF YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE IN A SWORDFIGHT This comes up a lot and I am working on upgrading the relevant wiki pages, but people seem to end up here anyway LOL. My basic advice: DON'T DO IT! It is ridiculously, fantastically dangerous. Modern people are calibrated for a whole different level of danger acceptance."

"Most of them don't actually care who wins because they understand it's just about who sits on the throne, they know the Crusaders aren't here to try to actually harm the city itself. All the potential emperors are assholes, and they're all related to each other, it hardly matters which one wins. So the citizens are literally picnicking and placing bets on who wins the day."

"USSS 1: I am beginning to get concerned messages from people in the Pentagon wanting to know why Backhoe is incommunicado. DOSECOPS C4: The Pentagon? USSS 1: The Trapezoid. Was my transmission garbled? DOSECOPS C4: Sorry, I was distracted. I thought you said Pentagon. USSS 1: I'm a little foggy myself with all of the weirdness around here and I may have said the wrong thing. I am referring to the [GARBLED]. The very large building across the Potomac River from DC that is the headquarters of the United States military. Does that help clarify matters? DOSECOPS C4: Sure. The Pentagon. USSS 1: That's what I'm saying!"

"BOG Container Lines Inc. is the survival into modern times of Bunch of Grapes, which is an extremely old presence in the shipping industry. I mean, it's named after a tavern in Boston from the 1600s that was named after a tavern in London that dates back to at least the 1200s...I'm still waiting for some query results to come back so that we can discover their inevitable connection to the Fuggers. I don't even know why I bother."

"To help the reader calibrate the level of weird that's going on, I believe that the building we all know as the Pentagon was called the Trapezoid when it was first built...It only became the Pentagon a few months ago. But when it did, it wasn't only the building itself that changed, but everyone's memories of it as well. So everyone, including me, thinks it has been the Pentagon from the moment its cornerstone (vertexstone? whatever) was laid...It was converted into the Pentagon on Halloween, just about two months ago, when a significant chunk of the United States military-industrial complex was taken over by witches."

"Sportsmanship is for sportsmen."

""We’re bankers. That is really all we are. If you’ve been imagining some sort of fabulous conspiracy, you are in for a disappointment. Bankers, you see, don’t actually do very much. We take our percentage. That is all. We subsist on movements of money—across space, across time, and between Strands.”"

"In this dream, Dodge was in the small town in Iowa where he had grown up...the grid street pattern of that town was, decades later, the spatial lattice on which virtually all of his dreams were constructed. It was the graph paper on which his mind seemed to need to plot things."

"The amount of time spent asleep didn't really matter. He had decided that the key to it all — the one thing that determined whether the nap would actually refresh him — was the breaking of the thread of consciousness...Even if he woke up ten seconds later, he would be as refreshed — possibly more so — as if he'd slumbered deeply for an hour."

"“I need you down here,” said his boss. “All hands on deck.” Then he hung up without explanation, leaving Corvallis with the vague feeling that he was missing something. ... The trail of notifications on his phone told the story. They had originated from various people on various social networks, but they had all been triggered by the same event: the surprising obliteration of the town of Moab, Utah, by what was apparently a tactical nuclear weapon."

"Someone in DC posted a snapshot of a pizza delivery guy on a Pentagon-bound Metro train, toting a stack of pizzas so high he had to use a two-wheeled dolly. Self-proclaimed experts in the comment thread were climbing all over one another to explain that massive pizza deliveries to the Pentagon were an infallible sign that something big was happening."

"In reenactment groups it was customary for each participant to adopt a persona, or, at a bare minimum, a nickname that wouldn't sound too jarringly anachronistic when called out in the heat of action. Corvallis had become Corvus, which was just the Latin word for “crow.” ... At first he'd been mildly uncomfortable with it.... He now saw it through a hybrid of Pacific Northwest aboriginal myths and Roman aviomancy. ... Crows, or ravens (the distinction was unclear), were set apart by their extreme intelligence, memory, and resourcefulness; but no matter how well they embodied those fine traits, no one appreciated them."

"Of crows, people tended to predicate the same traits that they did of Asians.... Crows were commendably intelligent, and forever busy, but you couldn't tell them apart and their motives were inscrutable. But living inside of his own head, Corvus well knew his own motives. There was nothing wrong with those motives and he didn't need to justify them to anyone else."

"The Moab hoaxers had inoculated the [Internet] with a ready-made hoax narrative that was obviously ridiculous, and tailor-made to appeal to the vociferous citizens of Crazytown. Right now everyone's uncle Harry—the angry truther at Thanksgiving dinner—was typing as fast as he could with the caps lock key in effect."

"Stand-up peeing in a long flowing garment could lead to various mishaps."

"Having spent the whole day sifting through incredibly depressing news reports, [the White House press corps] were bouncing back to a kind of giddy frame of mind brought on by a combination of completely natural and understandable happiness that Moab was fine...and schadenfreude directed at the social media companies that had been chipping away at their industry and their job security for the last couple of decades. Pointed questions were asked about how just unbelievably irresponsible those companies had been today and whether the scorpion-filled pits into which their executives should now be lowered should be a thousand meters deep or two thousand."

"All of the people in the conspiracy/troll ecosystem had been sucked into the vortex of Moab and begun to devote excruciating levels of attention to the entire cast of characters...performers in all of the fake videos and Corvallis Kawasaki. For he had been identified by name, on national television, by the president of the United States.... So within 24 hours, the citizens of Crazytown had compiled a huge dossier of mostly wrong material on him.... Crazytown was repelled by facts and knowledge, as oil fled from water, but was fascinated by the absence of hard facts, since it provided vacant space in which to construct elaborate edifices of speculation."

"The ancestral home of the Forthrasts was situated in the northwestern quadrant of Iowa...now being displayed in miniature, superimposed on a coffee table in an eating club at Princeton University, visible only to Sophia and to the friends she had shared it with: Phil, Julian, and Anne-Solenne. They could see it as long as they were wearing their glasses. They were planning a summer road trip. They had worked it out as far as Des Moines by following interstate highways. Now Sophia was proposing a diagonal transit to Sioux City on two-lane roads. The very idea of it had led to blank stares...until a solution had taken shape in the agile brain of Sophia's boyfriend Phil: “Look. I’m just not going to tell my parents—or anyone—that we are temporarily going off grid.” ... Sophia decided on the spot not to dump Phil for at least another few weeks."

"“Where are you from?” Sophia asked. Larry looked a bit startled. "I’m from here…Great-greats came over from Holland." "You said ‘y’all.’" Larry was confused.... "What was that about?" Anne-Solenne asked. "It’s totally a Southern way of talking. Iowa is a Northern state. Fought on the Union side in the Civil War. Never had slavery…Northerners don’t talk like that, they don’t drawl, they don’t say ‘y’all’...” “Or put the Stars and Bars on their bumpers,” said Julian...and pointed at a Confederate flag sticker on the back of Tom and Kevin's truck. “Point being, it was not like that to my uncle...When he was born, the Civil War was only ninety years in the past—almost within living memory. It would have seemed weird for Northerners to paste the traitors’ flag on their bumper or cop an accent from Alabama. But while he was alive—” “The cultural border shifted north.”"

"There was no one moment when they definitely crossed over into Ameristan. The closest thing to a formal ceremony was when Tom pulled over onto the gravel shoulder of a two-lane road between cornfields and yanked off the vehicles' license plates—which was evidently held on with magnets... Then the caravan was back on the road. “When in Rome,” Julian said... About an hour out of Des Moines, they did pass by a tiny sign—Sharpie on plywood—bearing what might have been the burning-cross logo of the Levitican Church."

"“Ted has normal-people teeth because he is old and grew up before this part of the world got Facebooked. After that, the people with education fled to places like Ames, Des Moines, Iowa City. Which includes dentists. A few mainline churches used to run charity dental clinics where you could get a bad tooth pulled, or whatever, but those are being chased away by these people.”"

"“There’s been all kinds of confusion about the Leviticans. Some kind of imagined link to the Ku Klux Klan.” “Maybe it’s because of the burning crosses,” Phil suggested, deadpan. “Supposedly the KKK burned crosses,” Ted said with a roll of the eyes. “There’s no ‘supposedly’ about it,” Anne-Solenne started in. “What are you even—” But Sophia silenced her with a hand on the arm. There was no point. “If that is even true, it has no connection to our burning crosses, which have a completely different significance,” Ted announced."

"Having caught Phil's eye, Sophia panned her gaze across the entire scene, asking him to take it all in. Reminding him that this wasn't Princeton. This was Ameristan. Facebooked to the molecular level. “Professor Long,” she muttered, “the Red Card.” It was a reference to...a wallet card for people to keep in front of them during conversations like this one. One side of the card was solid red, with no words or images, and was meant to be displayed outward as a nonverbal signal that you disagreed and that you weren't going to be drawn into a fake argument. The other side, facing the user, was a list of little reminders as to what was really going on: 1. Speech is aggression 2. Every utterance has a winner and a loser 3. Curiosity is feigned 4. Lying is performative 5. Stupidity is power"

"None of them said a word until they had parked in the Walmart's lot. “I am gonna buy some flowers,” Sophia said, “to put on the grave. We’re almost there. Within the blast radius of this.” She nodded toward the front of the superstore. “Blast radius?" “It’s only ten miles farther. Any retail base in the actual town will have been obliterated by this. So if we want to buy anything, we have to buy it here.”"

"They laid in a course for Moab, which ought to have been as simple as laying in a course for any other place. But a little warning did come up on Sophia's UI, letting her know that the existence of Moab was in question. Opinions differed as to whether it had been burned off the surface of the world by a nuclear blast twelve years ago. ... “It’s easy to forget,” Sophia remarked, “that there are millions of people who really don’t believe that Moab still exists. But when you’re here, you see the REMEMBER MOAB stickers all over the place.”"

"“One of Enoch’s ancestors was, like, the great-great-granddad of fractal geometry,” Julian reported. “In 1791—” “Oh, god, please don’t read the Wikipedia entry,” Enoch said, showing more emotion than when he had been literally crucified. “I have an edit overlay that filters out most of the garbage,” said Julian, mildly offended that Enoch had taken him for the kind of person who would actually take Wikipedia at face value. “But, Julian, I am sitting right next to you and so you don’t have to consult an online source.”"

"The Utah state legislature had been taken over by Moab truthers who insisted that Moab had been obliterated by nuclear terrorism 12 years ago. From which it followed that anyone claiming to actually live there was a troll, a crisis actor in the pay of, or a sad dupe in thrall to, global conspirators trying to foist a monstrous denial of the truth on decent folk. In recognition of, and indignation over, which they had passed a law ordering the state licensing bureau to stop accepting motor vehicle paperwork from Moab."

"“I could not be more confused as to what we are looking at right now,” announced Gloria Waterhouse. She was a philanthropist, connected with her family's foundation, nontechnical, and always the first to stand up and request commonsense explanations when the discourse became too academic. She'd assigned herself that role and she did it well."

"Her free hand came up. Daisy came up with it, the faded plastic petals floating in front of her face but gradually fading from view as she sank."

"Agreement got by compulsion or trickery is not agreement, but a thing akin to slavery. Free minds are the only company worth having."

"Corvallis took to the air and went for a spin on some tempting thermals while the visitors were shown in... He had known them now for forty years and resigned himself to the fact that their appearance did not change over time. He wheeled around them anyway, peering down on them from all angles. “Calling a meeting of the Societas Eruditorum?” C-plus asked. “You’re the only member left.""

"Six dawns in a row, a new soul glimmered on a branch of the old tree, only to fade in the strong light of the day...It looked like a star softened by drifting fog and mist... On the seventh morning it seemed to discard all hopes and intentions of ever making light of its own, and darkened and solidified into the form of a black bird."

"“I understand the speed of light!” Zula blurted. Faces turned toward her, gawped, then turned away. A hundred years ago, someone would have taken her up on the gambit. Now people were too intimidated—or perhaps they assumed she was finally losing it. Except for Enoch. “Explain it,” he urged her. “I’ve always wanted to understand.”"

"No sky, no neighboring houses, no trees, no mountains. The fog had clamped it all off. It muffled sound too...She and Enoch were existing in a bubble of space maybe a hundred paces across... She wondered if it had been thus for Dodge in the beginning, when he had been alone in Bitworld and the Landform had begun to take shape around him."

"“Where on earth are you going?” Zula asked, looking about for him. But she had lost him in the radiant fog. His voice was clear, though. It was the only sound in the world. “I’m not entirely sure,” he admitted. “But I’m done here. I did what I was sent to do.” The golden light grew until it was all she could see, and his voice was heard no more."

"Dolt & ass that I am I have lived more than 29 years, & until a few days ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William. Ah, he's full of sermons-on-the-mount, and gentle, aye, almost as Jesus. I take such men to be inspired. I fancy that this moment Shakspeare in heaven ranks with Gabriel, Raphael and Michael. And if another Messiah ever comes twill be in Shakesper's person. — I am mad to think how minute a cause has prevented me hitherto from reading Shakspeare. But until now, every copy that was come-atable to me, happened to be in a vile small print unendurable to my eyes which are tender as young sparrows. But chancing to fall in with this glorious edition, I now exult in it, page after page."

"I do not oscillate in Emerson's rainbow, but prefer rather to hang myself in mine own halter than swing in any other man's swing. Yet I think Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow. Be his stuff begged, borrowed, or stolen, or of his own domestic manufacture he is an uncommon man. Swear he is a humbug — then is he no common humbug. Lay it down that had not Sir Thomas Browne lived, Emerson would not have mystified — I will answer, that had not Old Zack's father begot him, old Zack would never have been the hero of Palo Alto. The truth is that we are all sons, grandsons, or nephews or great-nephews of those who go before us. No one is his own sire. — I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr Emerson. I had heard of him as full of transcendentalisms, myths & oracular gibberish; I had only glanced at a book of his once in Putnam's store — that was all I knew of him, till I heard him lecture. — To my surprise, I found him quite intelligible, tho' to say truth, they told me that that night he was unusually plain. — Now, there is a something about every man elevated above mediocrity, which is, for the most part, instinctuly perceptible. This I see in Mr Emerson. And, frankly, for the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool; — then had I rather be a fool than a wise man. — I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he don't attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plumet that will. I'm not talking of Mr Emerson now — but of the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving & coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began. I could readily see in Emerson, notwithstanding his merit, a gaping flaw. It was, the insinuation, that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions. These men are all cracked right across the brow. And never will the pullers-down be able to cope with the builders-up. And this pulling down is easy enough — a keg of powder blew up Block's Monument — but the man who applied the match, could not, alone, build such a pile to save his soul from the shark-maw of the Devil. But enough of this Plato who talks thro' his nose."

"And do not think, my boy, that because I, impulsively broke forth in jubillations over Shakspeare, that, therefore, I am of the number of the snobs who burn their tuns of rancid fat at his shrine. No, I would stand afar off & alone, & burn some pure Palm oil, the product of some overtopping trunk. — I would to God Shakspeare had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway. Not that I might have had the pleasure of leaving my card for him at the Astor, or made merry with him over a bowl of the fine Duyckinck punch; but that the muzzle which all men wore on their soul in the Elizebethan day, might not have intercepted Shakspers full articulations. For I hold it a verity, that even Shakspeare, was not a frank man to the uttermost. And, indeed, who in this intolerant universe is, or can be? But the Declaration of Independence makes a difference.—There, I have driven my horse so hard that I have made my inn before sundown."

"It will be a strange sort of book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree; — & to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this."

"There is a certain tragic phase of humanity which, in our opinion, was never more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne. We mean the tragedies of human thought in its own unbiassed, native, and profounder workings. We think that into no recorded mind has the intense feeling of the usable truth ever entered more deeply than into this man's. By usable truth, we mean the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as they strike the eye of the man who fears them not, though they do their worst to him, — the man who, like Russia or the British Empire, declares himself a sovereign nature (in himself) amid the powers of heaven, hell, and earth. He may perish; but so long as he exists he insists upon treating with all Powers upon an equal basis. If any of those other Powers choose to withhold certain secrets, let them; that does not impair my sovereignty in myself; that does not make me tributary. And perhaps, after all, there is no secret. We incline to think that the Problem of the Universe is like the Freemason's mighty secret, so terrible to all children. It turns out, at last, to consist in a triangle, a mallet, and an apron, — nothing more! We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets, and that He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us. But it is this Being of the matter; there lies the knot with which we choke ourselves. As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam. Yes, that word is the hangman. Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have Him in the street. There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,—why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag, — that is to say, the Ego. Whereas those yes-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage, and, damn them ! they will never get through the Custom House. What's the reason, Mr. Hawthorne, that in the last stages of metaphysics a fellow always falls to swearing so? I could rip an hour."

"Not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of them. Appreciation! Recognition! Is love appreciated? Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory — the world? Then we pigmies must be content to have our paper allegories but ill comprehended."

"In me divine magnanimities are spontaneous and instantaneous — catch them while you can. The world goes round, and the other side comes up. So now I can't write what I felt. But I felt pantheistic then—your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God's. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the Gods in old Rome's Pantheon. It is a strange feeling — no hopelessness is in it, no despair. Content — that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling."

"Whence came you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips — lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling. Now, sympathising with the paper, my angel turns over another leaf. You did not care a penny for the book. But, now and then as you read, you understood the pervading thought that impelled the book — and that you praised. Was it not so? You were archangel enough to praise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul."

"The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. (You perceive I employ a capital initial in the pronoun referring to the Deity; don't you think there is a slight dash of flunkeyism in that usage?)"

"Truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning."

"I am heartily sorry I ever wrote anything about you — it was paltry. Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing. So, now, let us add Moby-Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish; — I have heard of Krakens."

"It is — or seems to be — a wise sort of thing, to realise that all that happens to a man in this life is only by way of joke, especially his misfortunes, if he have them. And it is also worth bearing in mind, that the joke is passed round pretty liberally & impartially, so that not very many are entitled to fancy that they in particular are getting the worst of it."

"Whoever is not in the possession of leisure can hardly be said to possess independence. They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh. True Work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundreths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked."

"Instinct and study; love and hate; Audacity — reverence. These must mate, And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart, To wrestle with the angel — Art."

"Indolence is heaven’s ally here, And energy the child of hell: The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear But brims the poisoned well."

"In armies, navies, cities, or families, in nature herself, nothing more relaxes good order than misery."

"It was not a very white jacket, but white enough, in all conscience, as the sequel will show. The way I came by it was this..."

"Many sensible things banished from high life find an asylum among the mob."

"Oh, give me again the rover's life — the joy, the thrill, the whirl! Let me feel thee again, old sea! let me leap into thy saddle once more. I am sick of these terra firma toils and cares; sick of the dust and reek of towns. Let me hear the clatter of hailstones on icebergs, and not the dull tramp of these plodders, plodding their dull way from their cradles to their graves. Let me snuff thee up, sea-breeze! and whinny in thy spray. Forbid it, sea-gods! intercede for me with Neptune, O sweet Amphitrite, that no dull clod may fall on my coffin! Be mine the tomb that swallowed up Pharaoh and all his hosts; let me lie down with Drake, where he sleeps in the sea."

"Familiarity with danger makes a brave man braver, but less daring. Thus with seamen: he who goes the oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly."

"In time of peril, like the needle to the loadstone, obedience, irrespective of rank, generally flies to him who is best fitted to command."

"We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people — the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world."

"Though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much."

"A man of true science... uses but few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose; whereas the smatterer in science... thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things."

"Are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours, to civilize civilisation and christianize Christendom?"

"I had now been on board the frigate upward of a year, and remained unscourged; the ship was homeward-bound, and in a few weeks, at most, I would be a free man. And now, after making a hermit of myself in some things, in order to avoid the possibility of the scourge, here it was hanging over me for a thing utterly unforeseen, for a crime of which I was as utterly innocent. But all that was as naught."

"I cannot analyse my heart, though it then stood still within me. But the thing that swayed me to my purpose was not altogether the thought that Captain Claret was about to degrade me, and that I had taken an oath with my soul that he should not. No, I felt my man's manhood so bottomless within me, that no word, no blow, no scourge of Captain Claret could cut me deep enough for that. I but swung to an instinct in me — the instinct diffused through all animated nature, the same that prompts even a worm to turn under the heel. Locking souls-with him, I meant to drag Captain Claret from this earthly tribunal of his to that of Jehovah and let Him decide between us. No other way could I escape the scourge."

"Nature has not implanted any power in man that was not meant to be exercised at times, though too often our powers have been abused. The privilege, inborn and inalienable, that every man has of dying himself, and inflicting death upon another, was not given to us without a purpose. These are the last resources of an insulted and unendurable existence."

"I let nothing slip, however small; and feel myself actuated by the same motive which has prompted many worthy old chroniclers, to set down the merest trifles concerning things that are destined to pass away entirely from the earth, and which, if not preserved in the nick of time, must infallibly perish from the memories of man. Who knows that this humble narrative may not hereafter prove the history of an obsolete barbarism? Who knows that, when men-of-war shall be no more, "White-Jacket" may not be quoted to show to the people in the Millennium what a man-of-war was? God hasten the time!"

"The worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves; our officers cannot remove them, even if they would. From the last ills no being can save another; therein each man must be his own saviour. For the rest, whatever befall us, let us never train our murderous guns inboard; let us not mutiny with bloody pikes in our hands. Our Lord High Admiral will yet interpose; and though long ages should elapse, and leave our wrongs unredressed, yet, shipmates and world-mates! let us never forget, that, Whoever afflict us, whatever surround, Life is a voyage that's homeward-bound!"

"Would that all excellent books were foundlings, without father or mother, that so it might be, we could glorify them, without including their ostensible authors. Nor would any true man take exception to this; — least of all, he who writes, — "When the Artist rises high enough to achieve the Beautiful, the symbol by which he makes it perceptible to mortal senses becomes of little value in his eyes, while his spirit possesses itself in the enjoyment of the reality.""

"In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, — even though it be covertly, and by snatches."

"It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness. And if it be said, that continual success is a proof that a man wisely knows his powers, — it is only to be added, that, in that case, he knows them to be small. Let us believe it, then, once for all, that there is no hope for us in these smooth pleasing writers that know their powers."

"Certain it is, however, that this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world, without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance."

"You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the truth in."

"Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round."

"I found that but to glean after this man, is better than to be in at the harvest of others."

"The truth seems to be, that like many other geniuses, this Man of Mosses takes great delight in hoodwinking the world, — at least, with respect to himself. Personally, I doubt not, that he rather prefers to be generally esteemed but a so-so sort of author; being willing to reserve the thorough and acute appreciation of what he is, to that party most qualified to judge — that is, to himself. Besides, at the bottom of their natures, men like Hawthorne, in many things, deem the plaudits of the public such strong presumptive evidence of mediocrity in the object of them, that it would in some degree render them doubtful of their own powers, did they hear much and vociferous braying concerning them in the public"

"It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite."

"Call me Ishmael."

"I have no objection to any person’s religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don’t believe it also. But when a man’s religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him."

"Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death."

"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask."

"The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth? — Because one did survive the wreck."

"There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the green and golden world. Not a flower stirs; the trees forget to wave; the grass itself seems to have ceased to grow; and all Nature, as if suddenly become conscious of her own profound mystery, and feeling no refuge from it but silence, sinks into this wonderful and indescribable repose."

"From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it. That the starry vault shall surcharge the heart with all rapturous marvelings, is only because we ourselves are greater miracles, and superber trophies than all the stars in universal space. Wonder interlocks with wonder; and then the confounding feeling comes. No cause have we to fancy, that a horse, a dog, a fowl, ever stand transfixed beneath yon skyey load of majesty. But our soul's arches underfit into its; and so, prevent the upper arch from falling on us with unsustainable inscrutableness."

"Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space."

"But I shall follow the endless, winding way, — the flowing river in the cave of man; careless whither I be led, reckless where I land."

"What we take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of the minutest event — the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small characters by a sharpened feather."

"One trembles to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual's own innocent self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts."

"A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities."

"All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence."

"Silence is the general consecration of the universe. Silence is the invisible laying on of the Divine Pontiff's hands upon the world. Silence is at once the most harmless and the most awful thing in all nature. It speaks of the Reserved Forces of Fate. Silence is the only Voice of our God."

"The more and the more that he wrote, and the deeper and the deeper that he dived, Pierre saw the everlasting elusiveness of Truth; the universal lurking insincerity of even the greatest and purest written thoughts. Like knavish cards, the leaves of all great books were covertly packed. He was but packing one set the more; and that a very poor jaded set and pack indeed. So that there was nothing he more spurned, than his own aspirations; nothing he more abhorred than the loftiest part of himself. The brightest success, now seemed intolerable to him, since he so plainly saw, that the brightest success could not be the sole offspring of Merit; but of Merit for the one thousandth part, and nine hundred and ninety-nine combining and dovetailing accidents for the rest."

"His was the scorn which thinks it not worth the while to be scornful. Those he most scorned, never knew it."

"Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood."

""At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable," was his mildly cadaverous reply."

"Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance."

"Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay, but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none."

"And here Bartleby makes his home, sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all populous- a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage!"

""I would prefer not to." (A line spoken repeatedly by Bartleby)."

"If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid."

"Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed."

"Well, there is sorrow in the world, but goodness too; and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is."

"I cannot tell you how thankful I am for your reminding me about the apocrypha here. For the moment, its being such escaped me. Fact is, when all is bound up together, it's sometimes confusing. The uncanonical part should be bound distinct. And, now that I think of it, how well did those learned doctors who rejected for us this whole book of Sirach. I never read anything so calculated to destroy man's confidence in man. This son of Sirach even says — I saw it but just now: 'Take heed of thy friends'; not, observe, thy seeming friends, thy hypocritical friends, thy false friends, but thy friends, thy real friends — that is to say, not the truest friend in the world is to be implicitly trusted. Can Rochefoucault equal that? I should not wonder if his view of human nature, like Machiavelli's, was taken from this Son of Sirach. And to call it wisdom — the Wisdom of the Son of Sirach! Wisdom, indeed! What an ugly thing wisdom must be! Give me the folly that dimples the cheek, say I, rather than the wisdom that curdles the blood. But no, no; it ain't wisdom; it's apocrypha, as you say, sir. For how can that be trustworthy that teaches distrust?""

"With shouts the torrents down the gorges go, And storms are formed behind the storm we feel: The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel."

"The poor old Past, The Future's slave, She drudged through pain and crime To bring about the blissful Prime, Then — perished. There's a grave!"

"At the height of their madness The night winds pause, Recollecting themselves; But no lull in these wars."

"Youth is the time when hearts are large, And stirring wars Appeal to the spirit which appeals in turn To the blade it draws."

"What troops Of generous boys in happiness thus bred — Saturnians through life's Tempe led, Went from the North and came from the South, With golden mottoes in the mouth, To lie down midway on a bloody bed."

"Let us be Christians toward our fellow-whites, as well as philanthropists toward the blacks our fellow-men. In all things, and toward all, we are enjoined to do as we would be done by."

"There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual impartiality should be confounded with political trimming, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered be a cause not partisan. Yet the work of Reconstruction, if admitted to be feasible at all, demands little but common sense and Christian charity. Little but these? These are much."

"Patriotism is not baseness, neither is it inhumanity."

"Zeal is not of necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with poetry or patriotism."

"Benevolence and policy—Christianity and Machiavelli—dissuade from penal severities toward the subdued. Abstinence here is as obligatory as considerate care for our unfortunate fellow-men late in bonds, and, if observed, would equally prove to be wise forecast. The great qualities of the South, those attested in the War, we can perilously alienate, or we may make them nationally available at need."

"For the future of the freed slaves we may well be concerned; but the future of the whole country, involving the future of the blacks, urges a paramount claim upon our anxiety. Effective benignity, like the Nile, is not narrow in its bounty, and true policy is always broad."

"Amity itself can only be maintained by reciprocal respect, and true friends are punctilious equals."

"But are sailors, frequenters of fiddlers' greens, without vices? No; but less often than with landsmen do their vices, so called, partake of crookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness than exuberance of vitality after long constraint: frank manifestations in accordance with natural law."

"Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!"

"Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. In pronounced cases there is no question about them. But in some supposed cases, in various degrees supposedly less pronounced, to draw the exact line of demarcation few will undertake tho' for a fee some professional experts will. There is nothing nameable but that some men will undertake to do it for pay."

"In the light of that martial code whereby it was formally to be judged, innocence and guilt personified in Claggart and Budd in effect changed places. In a legal view the apparent victim of the tragedy was he who had sought to victimize a man blameless; and the indisputable deed of the latter, navally regarded, constituted the most heinous of military crimes."

"Says a writer whom few know, "Forty years after a battle it is easy for a non-combatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it. Much so with respect to other emergencies involving considerations both practical and moral, and when it is imperative promptly to act.""

"In war-time on the field or in the fleet, a mortal punishment decreed by a drum-head court — on the field sometimes decreed by but a nod from the General — follows without delay on the heel of conviction without appeal."

"If possible, not to let the men so much as surmise that their officers anticipate aught amiss from them is the tacit rule in a military ship. And the more that some sort of trouble should really be apprehended the more do the officers keep that apprehension to themselves; tho' not the less unostentatious vigilance may be augmented. In the present instance the sentry placed over the prisoner had strict orders to let no one have communication with him but the Chaplain. And certain unobtrusive measures were taken absolutely to insure this point."

"Billy's agony, mainly proceeding from a generous young heart's virgin experience of the diabolical incarnate and effective in some men — the tension of that agony was over now."

"Marvel not that having been made acquainted with the young sailor's essential innocence (an irruption of heretic thought hard to suppress) the worthy man lifted not a finger to avert the doom of such a martyr to martial discipline. So to do would not only have been as idle as invoking the desert, but would also have been an audacious transgression of the bounds of his function, one as exactly prescribed to him by military law as that of the boatswain or any other naval officer. Bluntly put, a chaplain is the minister of the Prince of Peace serving in the host of the God of War — Mars. As such, he is as incongruous as a musket would be on the altar at Christmas. Why then is he there? Because he indirectly subserves the purpose attested by the cannon; because too he lends the sanction of the religion of the meek to that which practically is the abrogation of everything but brute Force."

"At the penultimate moment, his words, his only ones, words wholly unobstructed in the utterance were these — "God bless Captain Vere!""

"The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction can not so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges..."

"But me they'll lash me in hammock, drop me deep. Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep. I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there? Just ease this darbies at the wrist, and roll me over fair, I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist."

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and along these fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects."

"under certain circumstances violence-acting without argument or speech and without counting the consequences-is the only way to set the scales of justice right again. (Billy Budd is the classical example.) In this sense, rage and the violence that sometimes-not always-goes with it belong among the "natural" human emotions, and to cure man of them would mean nothing less than to dehumanize or emasculate him. That such acts, in which men take the law into their own hands for justice's sake, are in conflict with the constitutions of civilized communities is undeniable; but their antipolitical character, so manifest in Melville's great story, does not mean that they are inhuman or "merely" emotional."

"Writing is also a profession, and, at its best, an honourable one. It has been made honourable by those who have already been members of it. Whether you like it or not, every time you set pen to paper you’re staring at the same blank space that confronted Milton, Melville, Emily Bronte, Dostoevsky and George Eliot, George Orwell and William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams, not to mention the latest hero, Gabriel Garcia Marquez."

"Forty-four years ago, when his most famous tale, Typee, appeared, there was not a better known author than he, and he commanded his own prices. Publishers sought him, and editors considered themselves fortunate to secure his name as a literary star. And to-day? Busy New York has no idea he is even alive, and one of the best-informed literary men in this country laughed recently at my statement that Herman Melville was his neighbor by only two city blocks. "Nonsense," said he. "Why, Melville is dead these many years!" Talk about literary fame? There's a sample of it!"

"Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists. Although some of the writers, like Melville and Longfellow, paid little attention to the war, most of the others either fiercely supported it or opposed it."

"It was during the 1820s-the beginning of the era of Jacksonian settler democracy-that the unique US origin myth evolved reconciling rhetoric with reality. Novelist James Fenimore Cooper was among its initial scribes. Cooper's reinvention of the birth of the United States in his novel The Last of the Mohicans has become the official US origin story. Herman Melville called Cooper "our national novelist.""

"On one meeting Melville showed Hawthorne a draft of Moby-Dick. Hawthorne, himself currently completing The Scarlet Letter, persuaded his friend to rework it from a tale of the high seas to an epic allegory that told not only a tale, but probed the defeats and triumphs of the human spirit. Melville delayed his submission to his publishers until it could meet Hawthorne's exacting standards. When it did, Hawthorne at last pronounced that the tragic tale was "cooked in hellfire." It was the praise Melville had sought."

"Melville and I had a talk about time and eternity, things of this world and next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters, that lasted pretty deep into the night."

"Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated"; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists — and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before — in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us."

"A man with true, warm heart, and a soul and an intellect, — with life to his fingerprints; earnest, sincere, and reverent; very tender and modest. And I am not sure that he is not a very great man. He has very keen perceptive power; but what astonishes me is, that his eyes are not large and deep. He seems to me to see everything accurately; and how he can do so with his small eyes, I cannot tell. They are not keen eyes, either, but quite undistinguished in any way. His nose is straight and handsome, his mouth expressive of sensibility and emotion. He is tall and erect, with an air free, brave, and manly. When conversing, he is full of gesture and force, and loses himself in his subject. There is no grace or polish. Once in a while, his animation gives place to a singularly quiet expression, out of those eyes to which I have objected; an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel that he is at that instant taking deepest note of what is before him. It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique. It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into itself."

"Nobody had more class than Melville. To do what he did in Moby-Dick, to tell a story and to risk putting so much material into it. If you could weigh a book, I don’t know any book that would be more full. It’s more full than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. It has Saint Elmo’s fire, and great whales, and grand arguments between heroes, and secret passions. It risks wandering far, far out into the globe. Melville took on the whole world, saw it all in a vision, and risked everything in prose that sings. You have a sense from the very beginning that Melville had a vision in his mind of what this book was going to look like, and he trusted himself to follow it through all the way."

"I was trying to describe a veteran of the Vietnam War, and I kept thinking of him as Billy Budd. I wondered, "Is this a correct comparison?" So I read it again today, and I realized that the book is about war. I didn't think about that before; I just thought it was about somebody good who was on a ship. I didn't remember the war. In those days they weren't drafted, they were impressed. The captain in the book even says, "Use the right word for it, it's impressment." Billy Budd is a draftee. And he goes along with it. The story is about mutiny within the military during wartime."

"Herman Melville, whose work I loved"

"THE greatest seer and poet of the sea for me is Melville. His vision is more real than Swinburne's, because he doesn't personify the sea, and far sounder than Joseph Conrad's, because Melville doesn't sentimentalize the ocean and the sea's unfortunates. Melville at his best invariably wrote from a sort of dreamself, so that events which he relates as actual fact have indeed a far deeper reference to his own soul, his own inner life. Melville was, at the core, a mystic and an idealist."

"if Herman Melville would have written "Moby Dick" in South Africa, it would be immediately taken for a fable about whites and blacks. In Latin America, they would read "Moby Dick" as a fable about macho and revolution. Some countries are probably doomed to have their literatures immediately interpreted in a general way."

"Herman Melville is a god. … I cherish what he did. He was a genius. Wrote Moby-Dick. Wrote Pierre. Wrote The Confidence-Man, wrote Billy Budd. … Oh, yes — look at him. … Scares the bejesus out of people and makes them hate him. Because he's so good. Claggart has him killed in that book. Claggart has his eye on that boy. He will not tolerate such goodness, such blondeness, such blue eye. Goodness is scary. It's like you want to knock it. You want to hit it."

"I've had my career. I've had my success. God willing, it should have happened to Herman Melville who deserved it a great deal more, you know? Imagine him being on Bill Moyers' show. Nothing good happened to Herman Melville."

"There has died and been buried in this city, during the current week, at an advanced age, a man who is so little known, even by name, to the generation now in the vigor of life that only one newspaper contained an obituary account of him, and this was but of three or four lines. Yet forty years ago the appearance of a new book by Herman Melville was esteemed a literary event, not only throughout his own country, but so far as the English-speaking race extended. To the ponderous and quarterly British reviews of that time, the author of Typee was about the most interesting of literary Americans, and men who made few exceptions to the British rule of not reading an American book not only made Melville one of them, but paid him the further compliment of discussing him as an unquestionable literary force. Yet when a visiting British writer a few years ago inquired at a gathering in New-York of distinctly literary Americans what had become of Herman Melville, not only was there not one among them who was able to tell him, but there was scarcely one among them who had ever heard of the man concerning whom he inquired, albeit that man was then living within a half mile of the place of the conversation. Years ago the books by which Melville's reputation had been made had long been out of print and out of demand."

"In its kind this speedy oblivion by which a once famous man so long survived his fame is almost unique, and it is not easily explicable. Of course, there are writings that attain a great vogue and then fall entirely out of regard or notice. But this is almost always because either the interest of the subject matter is temporary, and the writings are in the nature of journalism, or else the workmanship to which they owe their temporary success is itself the produce or the product of a passing fashion. This was not the case with Herman Melville. Whoever, arrested for a moment by the tidings of the author's death, turns back now to the books that were so much read and so much talked about forty years ago has no difficulty in determining why they were then read and talked about. His difficulty will be rather to discover why they are read and talked about no longer. The total eclipse now of what was then a literary luminary seems like a wanton caprice of fame. At all events, it conveys a moral that is both bitter and wholesome to the popular novelists of our own day."

"Melville was a born romancer. One cannot account for the success of his early romances by saying that in the Great South Sea he had found and worked a new field for romance, since evidently it was not his experience in the South Sea that had led him to romance, but the irresistible attraction that romance had over him that led him to the South Sea. He was able not only to feel but to interpret that charm, as it never had been interpreted before, as it never has been interpreted since."

"Sprawl trilogy quotes"

"Bridge trilogy quotes"

"Blue Ant trilogy quotes"

"Jackpot trilogy quotes"

"On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision. When I was writing Neuromancer, it was wonderful to be able to tie a lot of these interests into the computer metaphor. It wasn't until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there's a drive mechanism inside — this little thing that spins around. I'd been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them."

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."

"The NET is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it."

"In 1977, facing first-time parenthood and an absolute lack of enthusiasm for anything like "career," I found myself dusting off my twelve-year-old's interest in science fiction. Simultaneously, weird noises were being heard from New York and London. I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign. And I began, then, to write. And have been, ever since."

"The future is not google-able."

"There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related."

"Loss is not without its curious advantages for the artist. Major traumatic breaks are pretty common in the biographies of artists I respect."

"The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, novelists might be unusually difficult to deceive."

"Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking."

"This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work."

"We no longer grow the full beef of bohemia, It's all veal now."

"I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy."

"We're an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified..."

"“As broker, I'm usually very careful as to sources.” “You buy only from those who steal the best. Got it.”"

"Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County," Kihn said. "I interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl who'd been assaulted 'bya bar hade.'" "A what?" "A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar hade, see, was floating around on its own little flying saucer…Now that is the…straight goods from the mass unconscious. That little girl is a witch. There's just no place for her to function in this society. She'd have seen the devil, if she hadn't been brought up on 'The Bionic Man' and all those Star Trek reruns. She is clued into the main vein."

"If you want a classier explanation, I'd say you saw a semiotic ghost," Kihn said. "All these contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties' comic art."

"Hell of a world we live in…" "That's right," I said, "or even worse, it could be perfect."

"Parker saw his first ASP unit in a Texas shantytown called Judy's Jungle. It was a massive console cased in cheap plastic chrome. A ten-dollar bill fed into the slot bought you five minutes of free-fall gymnastics in a Swiss orbital spa, trampolining through twenty-meter perihelions with a sixteen-year-old Vogue model, heady stuff for the Jungle, where it was simpler to buy a gun than a hot bath."

"She swam through the submarine half-life of bottles and glassware and the slow swirl of cigarette smoke...she moved through her natural element, one bar after another."

"Coretti didn't know how to dress. Clothing was a language and Coretti a kind of sartorial stutterer, unable to make the kind of basic coherent fashion statement that would put strangers at their ease."

"The part of Coretti that was dialectologist stirred uneasily; too perfect a shift in phrasing and inflection. An actress? A talented mimic? The word mimetic rose suddenly in his mind, but he pushed it aside to study her reflection in the mirror; the rows of bottles occluded her breasts like a gown of glass."

"They had better luck with the seashell. Exobiology suddenly found itself standing on unnervingly solid ground: one and seven-tenths grams of highly organized biological information, definitely extraterrestrial. Olga's seashell generated an entire subbranch of the science, devoted exclusively to the study of...Olga's seashell."

"So now it's cargo cult time for the human race. We can pick things up out there that we might not stumble across in research in a thousand years...Charmian says that contact with "superior" civilizations is something you don't wish on your worst enemy."

"Colonel Korolev twisted slowly in his harness, dreaming of winter and gravity. Young again, a cadet, he whipped his horse across the late November steppes of Kazakhstan into dry red vistas of Martian sunset."

"The sun balloons!" cried Grishkin, pointing toward the earth. Kosmograd was above the coast of California now, clean shorelines, intensely green fields, vast decaying cities whose names rang with a strange magic. High above a fleece of stratocumulus floated five solar balloons, mirrored geodesic spheres tethered by power lines. "And they say that people live in those things?"

"For more than three decades the Americans had been gradually sliding into isolationism and industrial decline. Space, he thought ruefully, they should have gone into space. He'd never understood the strange paralysis of will that had seemed to grip their brilliant early efforts. Or perhaps it was simply a failure of imagination, of vision."

"When the knocking came, he knew that it must be a dream as well. The hatch wheeled open. He saw that the woman was black. Long corkscrews of matted hair rose like cobras around her head. "Andy," she said in English, "you better come see this!" "Is he alive?" "Of course I am alive." said Korolev in slightly accented English. The man called Andy sailed in over her head. "You okay, Jack?" His right bicep was tattooed with a geodesic balloon above crossed lightning bolts and bore the legend SUNSPARK 15, UTAH. "We weren't expecting anybody." "Neither was I," said Korolev, blinking."

"Korolev stared at the man, who had the blundering, careless look of someone drunk on freedom since birth."

""But why?" Korolev shook his head, deeply confused. "Why have you come?" "We told you. To live here…Who'd want to live out here for the sake of some government, some army brass, a bunch of pen pushers? You have to want a frontier—want it in your bones, right?" Korolev smiled. Andy grinned back."

"Kosmograd's hull rang again... "East Los Angeles," the woman said. "That's the one with the kids in it." She took off her goggles, and Korolev saw her eyes brimming over with a wonderful lunacy."

"We strolled past bales of raw wool and plastic tubs of Chinese microchips. I hinted that my employers planned to manufacture synthetic beta-endorphin. Always try to give them something they understand."

"But then there are days when it's like they whip aside a curtain to flash you three minutes of sunlit, suspended mountain, the trademark at the start of God's own movie. It was like that the day her agents phoned, from deep in the heart of their mirrored pyramid on Beverly Boulevard, to tell me she'd merged with the net, crossed over for good..."

"Got my jacket and took the stairs three at a time, straight out to the nearest bar and an eight-hour blackout that ended on a concrete ledge two meters above midnight."

"I stood there for a long time before I took that first step back. Because she was dead, and I'd let her go. Because, now, she was immortal, and I'd helped her get that way. And because I knew she'd phone me, in the morning."

"There was coffee. Life would go on."

"If I was looking to be depressed, I’d come to the right place."

"Bets were being made, being covered. The kickers were producing the hard stuff, the old stuff, liberty-headed dollars and Roosevelt dimes from the stamp-and-coin stores, while more cautious bettors slapped down antique paper dollars laminated in clear plastic. Through the haze came a trio of red planes, flying in formation. Fokker D.VIIs. The room fell silent."

"Deke looked at her through a wash of tears. Student. That fed look, the oversize sweatshirt, teeth so straight and white they could be used as a credit reference."

"Vasopressin makes you remember, I mean really remember. Clinically they use the stuff to counter senile amnesia, but the street finds its own uses for things."

"We were looking for the world's heaviest fence, for a non-aligned money laundry capable of dry-cleaning a megabuck online cash transfer and then forgetting about it...It was the Finn who put me on to what we needed. He even had the number. You want a fence, ask another fence."

""Macao," the Finn said. "Macao?" "The Long Hum family. Stockbrokers." The Long Hum people were so oblique that they made my idea of a subtle approach look like a tactical nuke-out."

"I think the last time I had one of those "CNN moments," where I was slammed right up against the windshield of the present, would have been seeing that federal building in Oklahoma City lying there in its own crater...and getting the idea that something bad had happened in Middle America. Whenever something like this happens, it ups the ante on being a science-fiction writer. It changes the nature of the game."

"Another example — maybe a better one, in a way — was when it was confirmed that Michael Jackson was going to marry Elvis Presley's daughter. A good friend of mine in the States faxed me, and he simply said, "This makes your job more difficult." And I knew exactly what he meant. Because something — a scenario — that seemed to belong to the universe of the late Terry Southern, was suddenly real. It's that truth-is-stranger-than-fiction factor keeps getting jacked up on us on a fairly regular, maybe even exponential, basis. I think that's something peculiar to our time. I don't think our grandparents had to live with that."

"It had much more to do with my wanting to be with hippie girls and have lots of hashish than it did with my sympathy for the plight of the North Vietnamese people under US imperialism. Much more, much more to do with hippy girls and hashish."

"Consequently, when I got to Toronto, much to my chagrin, I really couldn't handle hanging out with the American draft dodgers. There was too much clinical depression. Too much suicide. Too much hardcore substance abuse. They were a traumatized lot, those boys. And I just felt frivolous."

"The straight world didn't end. The straight world and the other world had bled into one another and produced the world that we live in today."

"Drugs were absolutely central to that experience, but they weren't essential. I only know that in retrospect. At the time I'm sure I would have said that they were."

"All any drug amounts to is tweaking the incoming data. You have to be incredibly self-centered or pathetic to be satisfied with simply tweaking the incoming data."

"Acceptance. Acceptance of the impermanence of being. And acceptance of the imperfect nature of being, or possibly the perfect nature of being, depending on how one looks at it. Acceptance that this is not a rehearsal. That this is it."

"I think of religions as franchise operations. Like chicken franchise operations. But that doesn't mean there's no chicken, right?"

"Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Halliday came to recognize the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as sigils preceding the dream state of a film."

"I became so frustrated with my inability to physically move the characters through the imaginary narrative space, that I actually developed an early form of imaginary VR technology that sort of covered my ass ... all they had to do was switch tapes and be in a different place, and I was spared the embarrassment of demonstrating that I didn't know how to get them up and down the stairs."

"All I knew about the word "cyberspace" when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page."

"It will bring about the extinction of the nation-state as we know it... I think it will be as big a deal as the creation of cities."

"I didn't imagine that art girls in the Midwest would be flashing their tits in cyberspace...but I'm glad that they're doing it."

"Later attempts sometimes involved outer space...I don't remember them. My wife parodied them all, not unkindly, as “His long green ears quivering, Fimo slipped from the rig.”...there was always something akin to “the rig.” Some unimagined (by me), hence unnamed, element of technology. But already I sensed that even if I had somehow come to know what the rig was, what it was for, it was better not to tell the reader just then. “Javnaker slipped from the quantum universe-splitter that wasn’t actually a time machine” would not be good for the reader."

"This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else's past, every present someone else's future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now. The best science fiction has always known that, but it was a sort of cultural secret. When I began to write fiction, at the very end of the Seventies, I was fortunate to have been taught, as an undergraduate, that imaginary futures are always, regardless of what the authors might think, about the day in which they're written. Orwell knew it, writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1948, and I knew it writing Neuromancer, my first novel, which was published in 1984."

"Time moves in one direction, memory in another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting."

"My first impulse, when presented with any spanking-new piece of computer hardware, is to imagine how it will look in ten years' time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop. And it probably will."

"I was born in 1948. I can't recall a world before television...Initially there was nothing on it but “snow,” and then the nightly advent of a targetlike device called “the test pattern,” which people actually gathered to watch. I imagine that the World Wide Web and its modest wonders are no more than the test pattern for whatever the twenty-first century will regard as its equivalent medium."

"In the age of wooden television in the South where I grew up, leisure involved sitting on screened porches, smoking cigarettes, drinking iced tea, engaging in conversation, and staring into space. It might also involve fishing. Sometimes the Web does remind me of fishing."

"“Surfing the Web” (as dubious a metaphor as “the information highway”) is, as a friend of mine has it, “like reading magazines with the pages stuck together.” My wife shakes her head in dismay as I patiently await the downloading of some Japanese Beatles fan's personal catalog of bootlegs. “But it’s from Japan!” She isn't moved. She goes out to enjoy the flowers in her garden."

"As new technologies search out and lace over every interstice in the net of global communication, we find ourselves with increasingly less excuse for...slack. And that, I would argue, is what the World Wide Web, the test pattern for whatever will become the dominant global medium, offers us. Today, in its clumsy, larval, curiously innocent way, it offers us the opportunity to waste time...It will probably evolve into something considerably less random, and less fun — we seem to have a knack for that — but in the meantime, in its gloriously unsorted Global Ham Television Postcard Universes phase, surfing the Web is a procrastinator's dream. And people who see you doing it might even imagine you're working."

"Rather than plug a piece of hardware into our gray matter, how much more elegant to extract some brain cells, plop them into a Petri dish, and graft on various sorts of gelatinous computing goo. Slug it all back into the skull and watch it run on blood sugar, the way a human brain's supposed to."

"I thought of the Garage Kubrick when I went to Sundance for the first time and saw young filmmakers doing what young filmmakers apparently must do to get attention for their work — the public part of which seemed to involve shuffling in a tense sort of lemming-lockstep up and down the main drag of Park City, talking on two cell phones at once and looking near-fatally stressed. The private part, the deal-making part, I assumed (based on experiences of my own) would be worse. Or simply wouldn't happen."

""Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes." — thought to be Gibson's words as a result of Twitter attribution decay, despite repeated disavowals. [https://twitter.com/#!/GreatDismal/status/144941061578559488 [https://twitter.com/#!/GreatDismal/status/171091202161131520. The source, according to Gibson, is Steven Winterburn [https://twitter.com/5tevenw/status/73091190475595776. However, Steven Winterburn is NOT the original creator of that quote. The original quote is the creation of Twitter account holder "@debihope" See research by quoteinvestigator [http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/10/25/diagnose/."

"And though I rather suspect that in a century’s time the novel will be as rare and private an art form as poetry today or that delicate and laborious process by which dedicated men fire glass with color, it will always be worth the doing."

"If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the things satirized; if they are not, the joke falls flat. Unfortunately for our native satirists, the American mass audience possess very little general information on any subject. Each individual knows his own immediate world, but as various research polls continually inform us, he holds little knowledge in common with others."

"The size of the population of course has much to do with this collective ignorance. When Aristophanes made a satiric point, he could be confident that his audience would appreciate his slyest nuance because in a small community each citizen was bound to share with his fellows a certain amount of general information, literary, religious, and political. National units today are too large and, in America at least, education is too bland to hope for much change."

"After the script was ready there were the usual trials, delays, problems of temperament: each participant confident the others had gone into secret league to contrive his professional ruin (and on occasion cabals did flourish…the theater is a child’s world)."

"I too feel hurt at the sort of reputation which hovers about my part of this venture. I cannot honestly make much of a case for myself. I played the game stolidly according to rules I abhor. But in extenuation I should like to say what many others have said before me: the theater and its writers are seriously, perhaps fatally, hampered by economic pressure. Because it costs too much to put on a play, one works in a state of hysteria. Everything is geared to success. Yet art is mostly failure. And it is only from a succession of daring, flawed works that the occasional masterwork comes. But in our theater to fail is death and the author of a play which fails is regarded with much the same sympathy as the murderer of a child."

"KRETON: Well, you know how one feels about history, the glamour of the past; I expected to hear everybody talking about great events—battles, poets, that kind of thing—but of course you don’t. You just squabble among yourselves."

"ELLEN: Of course I know you’re from another planet and all and I guess we do think an awful lot about sex, but we’re not supposed to talk about it and we only do it when nobody’s looking. KRETON: How ravishing! These primitive taboos. You revel in public slaughter: you pay to watch two men hit one another repeatedly, yet you make love secretly, guiltily and with remorse…too delicious!"

"POWERS: Well, good morning Mr. Kreton, and how are we today? KRETON: Absolutely wallowing in the twentieth century."

"KRETON: But I love having you bore me. You do it so beautifully."

"KRETON: My dear, you must marry him too. I’m sure the three of you would make a lovely couple."

"ELLEN: Conrad’s a pacifist and willing to fight for it."

"POWERS: No, I’ve seen it happen before too many times. Mr. Kreton, if there is one thing that destroys an army’s morale and discipline, it is a major war. Everything goes to hell. Lose more damn sheets and pillowcases. Your laundry’s a wreck!"

"CONRAD: (Patiently) I admit sometimes we get overexcited, but nobody wants a war, because nobody wants to be killed. KRETON: Well, every game has its penalties. I must say I would never have dreamed that one day I should be trying to convince a lower primate that he should behave like a lower primate."

"KRETON: War is your specialty. Historians love you for it. I love you for it. After all, not only is it fun, it’s creative! Your best scientific discoveries are made in wartime: the atom bomb, radar, luncheon meat. And think of all that travel! Getting away from home, making new acquaintances, indulging in amatory dalliance with strangers. So broadening. And then: the delirium of battle, the rush of adrenaline to the head as the trumpets sound ATTACK! Conrad, war is the principle art form of your race."

"DELTON 4: He is morally retarded and, like a child, he regards this world as his plaything.…"

"There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem."

"It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, however suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true."

"One can never rely on the great keeping one's letters; and should those letters vanish, one is apt to be remembered only as the mysterious half of a dialogue to be reconstructed in the vaguest way from the surviving (and sometimes lesser!) half of the exchange."

"Books always cost more in those cities where they are least read!"

"How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself."

"...for ferocity there is nothing on Earth equal a Christian bishop hunting "heresy", as they call any opinion contrary to their own."

"The folly of the clever is always more than that of the dull."

"In a good cause hypocrisy becomes a virtue."

"Constantine was never a true Galilean; he merely used Christianity to extend his dominion over the world. He was a shrewd professional soldier, badly educated and not in the least interested in philosophy, though some perverse taste in him was hugely satisfied by doctrinal disputes; the mad haggling of bishops fascinated him."

"Vengeance must end somewhere, and what better place to stop than at the prince?"

"Constantinople has no past; only a noisy present and a splendid future, if the auguries are to be believed."

"They say to know oneself is to know all there is that is human. But of course no one can ever know himself. Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange."

"It is one thing to use text to illustrate a point one is making, but quite another to quote merely to demonstrate the excellence of one's memory."

"By definition a bore is predictable. if you think you know in advance what a man is apt to say or do, you are not apt to be disagreeably surprised by him."

"...because academics everywhere are forever attacking one another, and I had long since learned that one must never believe what a teacher says of another."

"Despite all evidence to the contrary I do not believe humans innately cruel, but they fear change of any kind."

"Are we a dream in the mind of a deity, or is each of us a separate dreamer, evoking his own reality?"

"No one can tell another man is true. Truth is all around us...Truth is where ever man has glimpsed divinity."

"Modern Christianity is a encyclopedia of traditional superstition."

"His fault was a common one. He simply did not know what he was;he saw no flaw in himself, a not unusual blindness and preferable, on the whole , to being unable to find any virtue in oneself."

"The rhetoric of hate is often most effective when couched in the idiom of love."

"We are all so simple at heart that we become unfathomable to one another."

"The malice of a true Christian attempting to destroy an opponent is something unique in the world. No other religion ever considered it necessary to destroy others because they did not share the same beliefs. At worst, another man's belief might inspire amusement or contempt—the Egyptians and their animal gods, for instance. Yet those who worshipped the Bull did not try to murder those who worshipped the Snake, or to convert them by force from Snake to Bull. No evil ever entered the world quite so vividly or on such a vast scale as Christianity did."

"Men are odd. If they cannot be first, they don't in the least mind being last."

"We are all in the habit of censuring the great, as if we were popular playwrights, when in fact ordinary folk are quite as devious and as willful and as desperate to survive (if not prevail) as are thee great; particularly philosophers."

"On the throne of the world, any delusion becomes fact."

"Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors."

"There is no terror equal that of the ignorant in a strange place."

"American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither."

"Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies."

"I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults."

"Envy is the central fact of American life."

"First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me."

"The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature."

"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

"I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair."

"As one gets older, litigation replaces sex."

"I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise."

"The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all."

"At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice."

"The more money an American accumulates the less interesting he himself becomes."

"In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words."

"That peculiarly American religion, President-worship."

"The period of Prohibition — called the noble experiment — brought on the greatest breakdown of law and order the United States has known until today. I think there is a lesson here. Do not regulate the private morals of people. Do not tell them what they can take or not take. Because if you do, they will become angry and antisocial and they will get what they want from criminals who are able to work in perfect freedom because they have paid off the police."

"The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since."

"Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state."

"The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return ..."

"There is only one party in the United States, the Property party… and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently… and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties."

"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are."

"As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days."

"Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television."

"I say, they don't have to conspire, because they all think alike. The president of General Motors and the president of Chase Manhattan Bank really are not going to disagree much on anything, nor would the editor of the New York Times disagree with them. They all tend to think quite alike, otherwise they would not be in those jobs."

"Precocious talents mature slowly if at all."

"It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later. Finally, it is not too farfetched to imagine a future in which novels are not read at all."

"In any case, write what you know will always be excellent advice to those who ought not to write at all."

"Television is a great leveler. You always end up sounding like the people who ask the questions."

"Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around."

"Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them."

"The reason no one has yet been able to come up with a good word to describe the homosexualist (sometimes known as gay, fag, queer, etc.) is because he does not exist. The human race is divided into male and female. Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex, many don't; many respond to both. This plurality is the fact of our nature and not worth fretting about."

"My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general ("They tell lies," he used to say with wonder, "even when they don't have to")."

"The last best hope on earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie "answers" questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare."

"In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling."

"The average "educated" American has been made to believe that, somehow, the United States must lead the world even though hardly anyone has any information at all about those countries we are meant to lead. Worse, we have very little information about our own country and its past. That is why it is not really possible to compare a writer like Howells with any living American writer because Howells thought that it was a good thing to know as much as possible about his own country as well as other countries while our writers today, in common with the presidents and paint manufacturers, live in a present without past among signs whose meanings are uninterpretable."

"I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting."

"Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid."

"I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam — good people, yes, but any religion based on a single... well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system that has worked pretty well for twenty-five hundred years. So you see I am ecumenical in my dislike for the Book. But like it or not, the Book is there; and because of it people die; and the world is in danger."

"The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved — Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal — God is the Omnipotent Father — hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose."

"Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine."

"'Liberal' comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why the word had to be erased from our political lexicon."

"At least when the Emperor Justinian, a sky-god man, decided to outlaw sodomy, he had to come up with a good practical reason, which he did. It is well known, Justinian declared, that buggery is a principal cause of earthquakes, and so must be prohibited. But our sky-godders, always eager to hate, still quote Leviticus, as if that looney text had anything useful to say about anything except, perhaps, the inadvisability of eating shellfish in the Jerusalem area."

"A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adjective is often applied to those “liberals” who prefer to improve the lives of others rather than exploit them. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the highest altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for our vast freedom not only to conform but to consume."

"Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates."

"Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die."

"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity — much less dissent."

"To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun."

"Half the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for President — the same half?"

"Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination."

"Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the higher altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for the freedom not only to conform but to consume."

"I shared, naturally, in that hatred of organized labor which has been the one political constant in my lifetime, culminating in Ronald Reagan's most popular gesture, the smashing of the air-controllers' union. No alternative view of organized labor has ever come to us through the popular media. If labor leaders were not crooks like Jimmy Hoffa, they were in the pay of Moscow."

"It is notable how little empathy is cultivated or valued in our society. I put this down to our traditional racism and obsessive sectarianism. Even so, one would think that we would be encouraged to project ourselves into the character of someone of a different race or class, if only to be able to control him. But no effort is made."

"By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed."

"Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress."

"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."

"Must one have a heart of stone to read The Ballad of Reading Gaol without laughing? (In life, practically no one ever gets to kill the thing he hates, much less loves.) And did not De Profundis plumb for all time the shallows of the most reported love affair of the past hundred years, rivalling even that of Wallis and David, its every nuance (O Bosie!) known to all, while trembling rosy lips yet form, over and over again, those doom-laden syllables The Cadogan Hotel? Oscar Wilde. Yet again. Why?"

"...American society, literary or lay, tends to be humorless. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?"

"We do not, of course, write literary criticism at all now. Academe has won the battle in which Wilson fought so fiercely on the other side. Ambitious English teachers now invent systems that have nothing to do with literature or life but everything to do with those games that must be played in order for them to rise in the academic bureaucracy. Their works are empty indeed. But then, their works are not meant to be full. They are to be taught, not read. The long dialogue has broken down. Fortunately, as Flaubert pointed out, the worst thing about the present is the future. One day there will be no... But I have been asked not to give the game away. Meanwhile, I shall drop a single hint: Only construct!"

"After four centuries, Montaigne's curious genius still has that effect on his readers and, time and again, one finds in his self-portrait one's own most brilliant aperçus (the ones that somehow we forgot to write down and so forgot) restored to us in his essays—attempts—to assay—value—himself in his own time as well as, if he was on the subject, all time, if there is such a thing."

"World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual."

"The late Mr. [Carl] Sandburg was a public performer of the first rank ("Ker-oh-seen!" he crooned in one of the first TV pitches for the jet-engine — ole banjo on his knee, white hair mussed by the jet-stream), a poet of the second rank (who can ever forget that feline-footed fog?) and a biographer of awesome badness."

"In fact, the French - who read and theorise the most - became so addicted to political experiment that in the two centuries since our own rather drab revolution they have exuberantly produced one Directory, one Consulate, two empires, three restorations of the monarchy, and five republics. That's what happens when you take writing too seriously."

"Professor Richard N. Current fusses, not irrelevantly, about the propriety of fictionalising actual political figures. I also fuss about this. But he has fallen prey to the scholar-squirrel's delusion that there is a final Truth revealed only to the tenured few in their footnote maze; in this he is simply naïve."

"Current is also outraged by a reference to Lincoln's bowels, whose 'frequency,' he tells us, 'cannot be documented.' But, of course, they can. 'Truth-teller' Herndon tells us that Lincoln was chronically constipated and depended on a laxative called bluemass. Since saints do not have bowels, Current finds all this sacrilegious; hence 'wrong.'"

"What is going on here is a deliberate revision by Current not only of Lincoln but of himself in order to serve the saint in the 1980s as opposed to the saint at earlier times when black were still colored, having only just stopped being Negroes. In colored and Negro days the saint might have wanted them out of the country, as he did. But in the age of Martin Luther King even the most covertly racist of school boards must agree that a saint like Abraham Lincoln could never have wanted a single black person to leave freedom's land much less bravery's home. So all the hagiographers are redoing their plaster images and anyone who draws attention to the discrepancy between their own past crudities and their current falsities is a very bad person indeed, and not a scholar, and probably a communist as well."

"Basler finds my Lincoln the 'phoniest historical novel I have ever had the pleasure of reading.'... Also, 'more than half the book could never have happened as told.' Unfortunately, he doesn't say which half. If I knew, we could then cut it free from the phony half and publish the result as Basler's Vidal's Lincoln."

"Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln's invention of himself and, in the process, us."

"I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority)."

"Anais Nin gave me my most original, or so I thought, creation.As I read Incest, I realized that something which I had always taken to be unique, the voice of Myra Breckinridge, was actually that of Anaïs in all the flowing megalomania of the diaries. Of course, I had not read the diaries then, but even so, if only for that one thundering voice, I am forever in her debt."

"I used to be able to summon up scenes at will, but now aging memory is so busy weeding its own garden that, promiscuously, it pulls up roses as well as crabgrass."

"Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars."

"We're supposed to procreate and society, god knows, is ferocious on the subject. Heterosexuality is considered such a great and natural good that you have to execute people and put them in prison if they don't practice this glorious act."

"We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic. The founding fathers hated two things, one was monarchy and the other was democracy, they gave us a constitution that saw to it we will have neither. I don't know how wise they were."

"One year after 9/11, we still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil-libertarians that 9/11 applied not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected president with the oil and gas Cheney/Bush junta."

"Apparently, "conspiracy stuff" is now shorthand for unspeakable truth."

"Post-9/11, the American media were filled with pre-emptory denunciations of unpatriotic 'conspiracy theorists', who not only are always with us but are usually easy for the media to discredit since it is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life."

"Well, the Constitution has not yet been pregnant."

"Yo, peep. This me name be Gore Vidal. I is spitting rhymes about early history. Why homies give props to Uzis, not books? Ain't nothing but a mystery, aight."

"Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing."

"We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns."

"Lennon was somebody who was a born enemy of those who govern the United States. He was everything they hated. So I just say that he represented life, and is admirable; and Mr. Nixon and Mr. Bush represent death, and that is a bad thing."

"Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives."

"Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true."

"I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst."

"We must always remember that the police are recruited from the criminal classes."

"Don't ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren't any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I'm never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it."

"There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, "Well, so-and-so will like this," which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it."

"You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?"

"Everything's wrong on Wikipedia."

"Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, "I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any." We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once."

"Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country."

"Patriotism is as sickening today as it has ever been. I was watching the news before you came and there was a lot of coverage of Kosovo and the problems there. They showed footage of people burning an American flag. And the newscaster got all broken up and teary-eyed. He says, "I guess [sob] I just feel something here, folks, when I see the American flag being burned." And I said, You fucking asshole. Whatever happened to the news?"

"People in my situation get to read about themselves whether they want to or not. It's generally wrong. Or oversimplified — which is sometimes useful."

"We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else."

"You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It's just grotesque."

"Well, it's been the monopolizing of great wealth, which tends to happen in basically unjust societies and undemocratic societies. We have plenty of would-be democrats, would-be liberals, and would-be progressives. But how do you organize? The Democratic Party is a machine to get votes for its people, none of who should probably be elected to the high offices of state. That's all. The Republican Party is fundamentally crooked and might well be outlawed one of these days. Le Pen, you know, in France, who is an out-and-out fascist, the French have managed in some clever way to contain him. I mean, he's always running for president; his votes never seem to show up. I don't know how they do it, but we've got to do that with the Republican base, the religious right. We don't want them running the country. Nobody does. Certainly not the founding fathers. And I think we have to ride herd on them and make sure they do not seize the state."

"Well, you have to work out what it is. They are a little splinter. They can't summon many voters at any given time. They are a minority of a minority of a minority. They have everybody buffaloed because the great corporations like them and pay money to their candidates for sheriff and senator. And they're playing big-time politics. Yes, indeed. But the average person doesn't like them. You know, any time I want to get applause — and I lecture across America in state after state after state — when I fear things are getting a little low, I always say, “And another thing: Let us tax all the religions,” I bring down the goddamn house with that. And any politician would if he had sense enough to do it. The people don't like their tax exemption."

"Well, remember, all that area from which the Gore family comes was solid Democrat and progressive under Roosevelt for several decades. So they just didn't become Republicans because they all wanted to be bankers. They became it because they didn't like black people, and they thought the Democrats were pushing integration too fast. And that's how the great split came about, to the shame of the whole country."

"You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country."

"You think of the Republican Party as a party, like the British Conservative Party - well it isn't! I don't say that the British Conservative Party is much better, I'm only saying the Republican Party is a mindset. They love war! They love money! They're out to hang on through all the connections that they have, through their various operatives."

"The founding fathers were not interested in democracy, in fact, in a country with 3 1/4 million people, which is about what we were at the time of the separation from England, only 700,000 people could vote — white males of property. So it's never been terribly democratic. ...and they put together a constitution which would protect property for all time. No nonsense about democracy!"

"For reasons that I leave to a higher psychiatry, Jr. wanted a war in Iraq. ...Jr. is really pretty vague, you know. He just wanted to go... "Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! We gotta stand tall, ya know? We can't cut and run, yeah, ya know what I mean." We've had bad presidents in the past, but we've never had a G-- D--d fool!"

"They already had contingency plans ready in case of terrorism, violence, whatever, which they had inherited from Clinton, who had put together some terrible legislation after Timothy McVeigh blew up the building in Oklahoma City."

"It was ready-made for them to call an emergency and pretend it was war-time, you know, the war on terrorism is a metaphor, and terrorism is an abstract noun. It's like a "war on dandruff." There's no such thing, you know. It isn't war, it's just a slogan. But using the slogan they got through the U.S.A. Patriot Act, which removes many of our liberties. Nobody made a sound when we lost Habeas Corpus—due process of law—and suddenly Bush managed to get rid of it. Where was a voice on television, aside from mine, that spoke out against this? Where were all those noble jurists, those great lawyers, those lovers of liberty, where the hell were they? They were nowhere!"

"Now we have a totalitarian government. And the totalitarian government wants to watch everybody, total surveillance of everyone. They listen to the telephone conversations, they look at your credit cards, they look where you travel. We are totally policed. This is contrary to everything in our Constitution."

"I complain about the United States not being Athens. I certainly say we are a very good Roman republic, and the lies are based upon the most advanced techniques of advertising, which is the only art form my country has ever created — the television commercial — and we sell soap and presidents in the same fashion. Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to bring the truth back."

"Those who seem to think that the Bush administration had something to do with 9-11... I can prove that they didn't. They are totally incompetent! 9-11 was a brilliantly executed strike on the United States. I can't imagine anybody... I can't even imagine... Can you imagine Cheney, mumbling around, orchestrating something like that?"

"Americans are farcical when it comes to force majeure and money! Two things that they worship. You can't expect a democracy from a society like this."

"Islam, Judaism, Christianity are the three great evils that have befallen the world."

"Never have children, only grandchildren."

"Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice — registry offices, Romeo and Juliet, the disposable diaper — is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda."

"Gore is a man without an unconscious."

"Gore Vidal is a national icon...He is one of the best-known chroniclers of American history and politics...Following the publication of the first two of his latest trilogy of books examining the American empire, Vidal was described as the last "noble defender" of the American republic, America's last "small-r" republican."

"He was impressed by the young people who came to hear him, far less impressed by reviewers of his latest novel who seemed to have no historical education and therefore no context in which to place his fiction. For a writer steeped in Herodotus and Plotinus to be reviewed by those who have read neither must be galling. Gore is at heart an 18th-century man who belongs among those framers of the American Constitution — men who knew their Greek and Roman history and philosophy, and took the long, historical view of governments. His living on a promontory surrounded by ancient artefacts is indeed just what an 18th-century philosopher would do. He lives in splendid isolation — aiming fiery feuilletons at a dumb and dumber world. Gore Vidal understands what America might be if it didn't betray its own ideals — the ideals we gave the world and then renounced in favour of corporate oligarchy and the perpetual war machine. When we said goodbye after dinner and headed back to the sailboat we had anchored on the coast, I was inspired. Gore Vidal is everything a writer should be: a voice for sanity in a mad world."

"An avowed atheist, Vidal insists that his image as an acid-tongued “gentleman bitch" is no pose: “I'm exactly as I appear. There is no warm loveable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.""

"He is the most Swiftian writer we have in his savage pessimism about the human condition, his unresolved paradoxes, his hatred of hypocrisy, corruption and the kind of patriotism which means nothing more than "persuading a man to kill a man he doesn’t know"."

"The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client."

"Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it."

"The 'Other Half' is the word. The 'Other Half' is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the 'Other Half' is a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common 'hallucinations' of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject's body at an angle...yes quite an angle it is the 'Other Half' worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word."

"1. Never give anything away for nothing. 2. Never give more than you have to (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait). 3. Always take back everything if you possibly can."

"You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live."

"The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts and feelings. They are pain killers; pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers — the whole spectrum of sedative drugs."

"When a certain stage of responsibility and awareness has been reached by a young banker he is taken to a room lined with family portraits in the middle of which is an ornate gilded toilet. Here he comes every day to defecate surrounded by the family portraits until he realizes that money is shit. And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity. There was a time when the machine ate in moderation from a plentiful larder and what it ate was replaced. Now the machine is eating faster."

"A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what's going on."

"Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words."

"There is simply no room left for 'freedom from the tyranny of government' since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it."

"You are a Shit Spotter. It's satisfying work. ... We have observed that most of the trouble in the world has been caused by ten to twenty percent of folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus. Now your virus is an obligate cellular parasite and my contention is that evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a certain brain area which we may term the RIGHT center. The mark of a basic shit is that he has to be right. And right here we must make a diagnostic distinction between the hard-core virus-occupied shit and a plain, ordinary, mean no-good son of a bitch. Some of these sons of bitches don't cause any trouble at all, just want to be left alone."

"Victimless crimes are the lifeline of the RIGHT virus. And there is a growing recognition, even in official quarters, that victimless crimes should be removed from the books or subject to minimal penalties. Those individuals who cannot or will not mind their business cling to the victimless-crime concept, equating drug use and private sexual behavior with robbery and murder. If the right to mind one's own business is recognized, the whole shit disposition is untenable and Hell hath no vociferous fury than an endangered parasite."

"Last night I encountered a dream cat with a very long neck and a body like a human fetus, gray and transluscent. I don't know what it needs or how to provide for it. Another dream years ago of a human child with eyes on stalks. It is very small, but can walk and talk "Don't you want me?" Again, I don't know how to care for the child. But I am dedicated to protecting and nurturing him at any cost! It is the function of the Guardian to protect hybrids and mutants in the vulnerable stage of infancy."

"This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers."

"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military."

"England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs."

"Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE."

"Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don't make compromises, don't worry about making a bunch of money or being successful — be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency."

"The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity."

"When you stop growing you start dying."

"I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life."

"Tea heads are not like junkies. A junky hands you the money, takes his junk and cuts. But tea heads don't do things that way. They expect the peddler to light them up and sit around talking for half an hour to sell two dollars' worth of weed. If you come right to the point, they say you are a "bring down." In fact, a peddler should not come right out and say he is a peddler."

"Tea heads are gregarious, they are sensitive, and they are paranoiac. If you get to be known as a "drag" or a "bring down," you can't do business with them."

"I can say definitely that weed is an aphrodisiac and that sex is more enjoyable under the influence of weed than without it. Anyone who has used good weed will verify this statement."

"The American uppermiddle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not."

"You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere."

"I lay down and tried to sleep. When I closed my eyes I saw an Oriental face, the lips and nose eaten by disease. The disease spread, melting the face into an amoeboid mass in which the eyes floated, dull crustacean eyes. Slowly, a new face formed around the eyes. A series of faces, hieroglyphs, distorted and leading to the final place where the human road ends, where the human form can no longer contain the crustacean horror that has grown inside it."

"Coke is pure kick. It lifts you straight up, a mechanical lift that starts leaving you as soon as you feel it"

"A ghost in daylight on a crowded street."

"A junky runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junk time to start. A sick junkie has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait."

"When people start talking about their bowel movements, they are inexorable as the processes of which they speak."

"A lot of people made quick easy money during the War and for several years after. Any business was good, just as any stock is good on a rising market. People thought they were sharp operators, when actually they were just riding a lucky streak. Now the Valley is in a losing streak and only the big operators can ride it out. In the Valley economic laws work out like a formula in high school algebra, since there is no human element to interfere. The very rich are getting richer and all the others are going broke. The big holders are not shrewd or ruthless or enterprising. They don't have to say or think anything. All they have to do is sit and the money comes pouring in. You have to get up with the Big Holders or drop out and take any job they hand you. The middle class is getting the squeeze, and only one in a thousand will go up. The Big Holders are the house, and the small farmers are the players. The player goes broke if he keeps on playing, and the farmer has to play or lose to the Government by default."

"Sodomy is as old as the human species."

"Why does an addict get a new habit so much quicker than a junk virgin, even after the addict has been clean for years? I do not accept the theory that junk is lurking in the body all that time - the spine is where it supposedly holes up - and I disagree with all psychological answers. I think the use of junk causes permanent cellular alteration. Once a junky, always a junky. You can stop using junk, but you are never off after the first habit."

"Junk short-circuits sex. The drive to non-sexual sociability comes from the same place sex comes from, so when I have an H or M shooting habit I am non-sociable. If someone wants to talk, O.K. But there is no drive to get acquainted. When I come off the junk, I often run through a period of uncontrolled sociability and talk to anyone who will listen."

"Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness."

"Junk is an inoculation of death that keeps the body in a condition of emergency"

"You sometimes wake up from a dream and think, "Thank God, I didn't really do that!" Reconstructing a period of blackout you think, "My God, did I really do that?" The line between saying and thinking is blurred. Did you say it or just think it?"

"When you give up junk, you give up a way of life. I have seen junkies kick and hit the lush and wind up dead in a few years. Suicide is frequent among ex-junkies. Why does a junky quit junk of his own will? You never know the answer to that question. No conscious tabulation of the disadvantages and horrors of junk gives you the emotional drive to kick. The decision to quit junk is a cellular decision, and once you have decided to quit you cannot go back to junk permanently any more than you could stay away from it before."

"Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, frightened flesh. Maybe I will find in yage what I was looking for in junk and weed and coke."

"The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite."

"If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in the Street, and stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups" so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it."

"I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train..."

"Junk is surrounded by magic and taboos, curses and amulets."

"Shooting PG is a terrible hassle, you have to burn out the alcohol first, then freeze out the camphor and draw this brown liquid off with a dropper—have to shoot it in the vein or you get an abscess, and usually end up with an abscess no matter where you shoot it. Best deal is to drink it with goof balls ... So we pour it in a Pernod bottle and start for New Orleans past iridescent lakes and orange gas flares, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, marooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish ... New Orleans is a dead museum. We walk around Exchange Place breathing PG and find The Man right away. It's a small place and the fuzz always knows who is pushing so he figures what the hell does it matter and sells to anybody. We stock up on H and backtrack for Mexico. Back through Lake Charles and the dead slot-machine country, south end of Texas, nigger-killing sheriffs look us over and check the car papers. Something falls off you when you cross the border into Mexico, and suddenly the landscape hits you straight with nothing between you and it, desert and mountains and vultures; little wheeling specks and others so close you can hear wings cut the air (a dry husking sound), and when they spot something they pour out of the blue sky, that shattering bloody blue sky of Mexico, down in a black funnel ... Drove all night, came at dawn to a warm misty place, barking dogs and the sound of running water."

"I was standing outside myself trying to stop those hangings with ghost fingers. . . . I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants—a body—after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is only the colorless no smell of death. . . . Nobody can breathe and smell it through pink convulsions of gristle laced with crystal snot, time shit and black blood filters of flesh"

"Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit --- Kid, it was tasty."

"America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting."

"Well as, one judge said to the other, 'Be just and if you can't be just be arbitrary.' Regret cannot observe customary obscenities."

"Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside."

"A functioning police state needs no police."

"The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets."

"“Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony."

"Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa’s face."

"The relation between an O.A. (Oblique Addict) and his R.C. (Recharge Connection) is so intense that they can only endure each other’s company for brief and infrequent intervals—I mean aside from recharge meets, when all personal contact is eclipsed by recharge process."

"Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand."

"I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness... When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Banisteriopsis caapi, LSD6, Sacred Mushrooms or any other drugs of the hallucinogen group... There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence."

"Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror."

"The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus. (It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host."

"Benway: Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard. This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The Better ‘Ole” that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?” “Nah I had to go relieve myself.” After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: “It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don't need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.” After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the eyes you dig. That's one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn't give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eyes on the end of a stalk."

"You see control can never be a means to any practical end. ... Control can never be a means to anything but more control ... like Junk."

"The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell.... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus. 'The Human Virus can now be isolated and treated.'"

"Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out."

"At all levels the drug trade operates without without schedule. Nobody delivers on time except by accident. The addict runs on junk time. His body is his clock, and junk runs through it like an hour-glass. Time has meaning for him only with reference to his need. Then he make his abrupt intrusion into the time of others, and, like all Outsiders, all Petitioners, he must wait, unless he happens to mesh with non-junk time."

"There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose "story "plot" "continuity"... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer."

"Senators leap up and bray for the Death Penalty with inflexible authority of virus yen... Death for dope fiends, death for sex queens (I mean friends) death for the psychopath who offends the cowed and graceless flesh with broken animal innocence of lithe movements. The black wind of death undulates over the land, feeling, smelling for the crime of separate life, movers of the fear-frozen flesh shivering under a vast probability curve... Populations blocks disappear in a checker game of genocide... Any number can play..."

"You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative"

"So he imports this special breed of scorpions and feeds them on metal meal and the scorpions turned a phosphorescent blue color and sort of hummed. “Now we must find a worthy vessel,” he said. So we flush out this old goof ball artist and put the scorpion to him and he turned sort of blue and you could see he was fixed right to metal. These scorpions could travel on a radar beam and service the clients after Doc copped for the bread. It was a good thing while it lasted and the heat couldn't touch us. However all these scorpion junkies began to glow in the dark and if they didn't score on the hour metamorphosed into scorpions straight away. So there was a spot of bother and we had to move on disguised as young junkies on the way to Lexington. Bill and Johnny we sorted out the names but they keep changing like one day I would wake up as Bill the next day as Johnny. So there we are in the train compartment shivering junk sick our eyes watering and burning."

"Cut word lines — Cut music lines — Smash the control images — Smash the control machine — Burn the books — Kill the priests — Kill! Kill! Kill!"

"Listen to my last words anywhere. Listen to my last words any world. Listen all you board syndicates and governments of the earth. And you powers behind what filth deals consumated in what lavatory to take what is not yours. To sell the ground from unborn forever-"

"I will tell you: "'the word.'" Alien Word 'the.' "'The word'" of Alien Enemy imprisons "'thee'" in Time. In Body. In Shit. Prisoner, come out. The great skies are open. I Hassan i Sabbah 'rub out the word forever' If you I cancel all your words forever. And the of Hassan i Sabbah as also cancel. Cross all your skies see the silent writing of Brion Gysin Hassan i Sabbah: drew September 16, 1899 over New York."

"'Peoples of the earth, you have all been poisoned.' Convert all available stocks of morphine to apomorphine. Chemists, work round the clock on variation and synthesis of the apomorphine formulae."

"The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. In 'Naked Lunch', 'Soft Machine' and 'Nova Express' I show who they are and what they are doing and what they will do if they are not arrested. Minutes to go. Souls rotten from their orgasm drugs, flesh shuddering from their nova ovens, prisoners of the earth to 'come out'. With your help we can occupy The Reality Studio and retake their universe of Fear Death and Monopoly-"

"I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go."

"Home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else's ass."

"‘In the fields workers are planting maize seeds under the direction of an overseer with staff and headdress. Close-up of a worker’s face. Whatever it is that makes a man a man, all feeling and all soul has gone out in that face. Nothing is left but body needs and body pleasures. I have seen faces like that in the back wards of state hospitals for the insane. Faces that live to eat, shit and masturbate.’"

"Before my father started using morphine again he sent me to a Japanese person to learn something called Karate. I learn these things fast because I am blank inside, and I have no special way of moving or doing things so one way is the same to me as another. ‘"

"I saw the Colonel empty his revolver and go down under ten wild boys. A moment later they tossed his bleeding head into the air and started a ball game. Just at dusk the wild boys got up and padded away. They left the bodies stripped to the skin many with genitals cut off. The wild boys make little testicles in which they carry their hasish and khat."

"The rudeness of many Americans depressed him, a rudeness based on a solid ignorance of the whole concept of manners, and on the proposition that for social purposes, all people are more or less equal and interchangeable."

"Lola's was not exactly a bar. It was a small beer-and-soda joint. There was a Coca-Cola box full of beer and soda and ice at the left of the door as you came in. A counter with tube-metal stools covered in yellow glazed leather ran down one side of the room as far as the jukebox. Tables were lined along the wall opposite the counter. The stools had long since lost the rubber caps for the legs and made horrible screeching noises when the maid pushed them around to sweep. There was a kitchen in back, where a slovenly cook fried everything in rancid fat. There was neither a past nor future in Lola's. The place was a waiting room, where certain people checked in a certain times."

"Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy's face. An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face. Now Lee's hands were running down his ribs, the stomach. Lee felt the aching pain of desire in his lungs."

"A curse," said Lee. "Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands when the baneful word seared my reeling brain: 'homosexual'. I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted simpering female impersonators I'd seen in a Baltimore nightclub. Could it be possible I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze like a man with a light concussion- just a minute, Doctore Kildare, this isn't your script. I might as well have destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation. Nobler, I thought to die a man than life on, a sex monster. It was a wise old queen - Bob, we called her- who taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink."

"He forced himself to look at the facts. Allerton was not queer enough to make a reciprocal relation possible. Lee's affection irritated him. Like many people who have nothing to do, he was very resentful of any claims on his time. He had no close friends. He disliked definite appointments. He did not like to feel that anybody expected anything from him. He wanted, so far as possible, to live without external pressure."

"He felt a killing hate for the stupid, ordinary, disapproving people who kept him from doing what he wanted to do. "Someday I am going to have things just like I want," he said to himself. "And if any moralizing son of a bitch gives me any static, they will fish him out of the river."

"Every time I hit Panama, the place is exactly one month, two months, six months more nowhere, like the progress of a degenerative illness. A shift from arithmetic to geometric progressive seems to have occurred. Something ugly and ignoble and subhuman is cooking in this mongrel town of pimps and whores and recessive genes, this degraded leech on the Canal."

"Stupid people can learn a language quiet and easy because there is nothing going on in there to keep it out."

"Many so called primitives are afraid of cameras. They think it can capture their soul and take it away. There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, sexual intensity, a sexual intensity of pursuit."

"Mexico city is a terminal of space-time travel, a waiting room where you grab a quick drink while you wait for your train. That is why I can stand to be in Mexico City for your train. That is why I can stand to be in Mexico City or New York. You are not struck; by the fact of being there at all, you are traveling. But in Panama, crossroads of the world, you are exactly so much aging tissue. You have to make arrangements with Pan Am or the Dutch Line for removal of your body. Otherwise, it would stay there and rot in muggy heat, under a galvanized iron roof."

"In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain."

"Sit down on your ass, or what's left of it after four years in the navy."

"Youth rebellion is a world wide phenomenon that has not been seen before in history. I don't believe they will calm down and be ad execs at thirty as the establishment would like to believe. Millions of young people all over the world are fed up with shallow unworthy authority running on a platform of bullshit."

"As a young child Audrey Carsons wanted to be writers because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle."

"According to legend the white race results from a nuclear explosion in what is now the Gobi desert some 30,000 years ago. The civilization and techniques which made the explosion possible were wiped out. The only survivors were slaves marginal to the area who had no knowledge of its science or techniques. They became albinos as a result of radiation and scattered in different directions. Some of them went into Persia northern India Greece and Turkey. Others moved westward and settled in the caves of Europe. The descendants of the cave-dwelling albinos are the present inhabitants of America and western Europe. In these caves the white settlers contracted a virus passed down along their cursed generations that was to make them what they are today a hideous threat to life on the planet. This virus this ancient parasite is what Freud calls the unconscious spawned in the caves of Europe on flesh already diseased from radiation. Anyone descended from this line is basically different from those who have not had the cave experience and contracted this deadly sickness that lives in your blood and bones and nerves that lives where you used to live before your ancestors crawled into their filthy caves. When they came out of the caves they couldn't mind their own business. They had no business of their own to mind because they didn't belong to themselves any more. They belonged to the virus. They had to kill torture conquer enslave degrade as a mad dog has to bite. At Hiroshima all was lost."

"Remember the Italian steward who put on women's clothes and so filched a seat in a lifeboat? "A cur in human shape, certainly he was born and saved to set a new standard by which to judge infamy and shame."

"No job too dirty for a fucking scientist."

"Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal."

"Consider the impasse of a one-God universe. He is all-knowing and all-powerful. He can't go anywhere, since He is already everywhere. He can't do anything, since the act of doing presupposes opposition. His universe is irrevocably thermodynamic, having no friction by definition. So, He has to create friction: War, Fear, Sickness, Death, to keep his dying show on the road."

"Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? "And here is my good big centipede!" If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race."

"Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape."

"After teaching a class in Creative Writing a few years back, my own creative powers fell to an all-time low. I really had a case of writer's block, and my idealistic young assistant complained that I simply sat around the loft doing absolutely nothing; which was absolutely true. This gave me time to think (as the French say): Can creative writing be taught?"

"My advice is to get a good agent and a good tax accountant if you ever make any money, and remember, you can't eat fame. And you can't write unless you want to write, and you can't want to unless you feel like it."

"Brainwashing, psychotropic drugs, lobotomy, and other more subtle form of psychosurgery; the technocratic control apparatus of the United States has at its fingertips new techniques if which fully exploited could make Orwell's 1984 seem like a benevolent utopia."

"All modern systems are riddled with contradictions."

"Concession is another control bind. History shows that once a government starts to make concessions it is on a one-way street."

"Any imposition of government censorship on the media is a step in the direction of State control, a step which big money is most reluctant to take."

"A government is never more dangerous than when embarking on a self-defeating or downright suicidal course."

"William S. Burroughs is one of the most pathetic figures in modern literature, his sadness made more poignant because it has been drawn out for so long. His cadaverous presence gave a hollow echo to a key scene in “Drugstore Cowboy,” in which he was a junkie ex-priest who has long decades of pain in his eyes. It didn't seem like acting. And in a recent documentary about his life, Burroughs came across as a man who walks around with something wounded inside, something that hurts so much that his spirit simply shut down."

"It would take me all night to tell about Old Bull Lee; let's just say now, he was a teacher, and it may be said that he had every right to teach because he spent all his time learning; and the things he learned were what he considered to be and called "the facts of life," which he learned, not only out of necessity but because he wanted to. He dragged his long, thin body around the entire United States and most of Europe and North Africa in his time, only to see what was going on.... there are pictures of him with the international cocaine set of the thirties — gangs with wild hair, leaning on one another, there are other pictures of him in a Panama hat, surveying the streets of Algiers.... He was an exterminator in Chicago, a bartender in New York, a summons-server in Newark. In Paris he sat at cafe tables, watching the sullen French faces go by. In Athens he looked up from his ouzo at what he called the ugliest people in the world. In Istanbul he threaded his way through crowds of opium addicts and rug-sellers, looking for the facts. In Chicago he planned to hold up a Turkish bath, hesitated just for two minutes too long for a drink, and, wound up with two dollars and had to make a run for it. He did all these things merely for the experience...."

"There's another book called The Naked Lunch which I couldn't even finish reading, but it's published, and I think the author should be in jail ..."

"Of the Beat triumvirate, Kerouac was probably both the most pathetic and least noxious. Psychologically, he was a mess—as indeed were Ginsberg and Burroughs. But, unlike them, Kerouac lacked the knack of sanctifying his pathologies and inducing others to bow down in obeisance."

"William Burroughs also believed in taking Vitamin/C."

"(“Did you ever look for women writers, in particular, or look to find your own experience in your reading?”) No, not when I was very young. It's not so much that I looked for women writers, but I had sense enough to know that, like Henry Miller, he wasn't writing for me. That's as far as I went. I knew that these guys, even the Beats-I thought they were nice, nice to see all those boys, and nice to see all the sexual feelings, but I knew it really wasn't written for me at all. It's not so much that I looked for women writers, as that I understood certain much admired writers, like Burroughs, weren't talking to me. There was nothing to get from them. Though at the same time I did get stuff from Proust. That talked to me, but all those ballsy American heroes had nothing to say to me, though my friends thought they were just hot shit, excuse me."

"Burroughs doesn't interest me at all as a novelist; his experimental, psychedelic stories have always bored me, so much that I don't think I've ever been able to read one. But Junky, the first book he wrote, a factual and autobiographical account of how he became a drug addict and how his addiction to drugs -- free choice augmenting what was already doubtless a certain proclivity -- made him a willing slave, furnishes an accurate description of what I believe to be the literary vocation, of the utter interdependence of the writer and his work and the way the latter feeds on the former, on all he is and all he does or does not do."

"I first heard of the 23 Enigma from William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark's ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23."

"In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that."

"I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strongly divided on the credibility of some kind of functionalist reductionism, and I won't go through my reasons for being on the antireductionist side of that debate. Despite significant attempts by a number of philosophers to describe the functional manifestations of conscious mental states, I continue to believe that no purely functionalist characterization of a system entails — simply in virtue of our mental concepts — that the system is conscious."

"Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions."

"Consciousness is what makes the mind–body problem really intractable."

"Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless."

"Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed."

"[E]very subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective physical theory will abandon that point of view."

"Bats … present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life."

"[T]he essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation. … But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat."

"Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task."

"Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experience of bats, if we only knew what they were like."

"I am not adverting here to the alleged privacy of experience to its possessor. The point of view in question is not one accessible only to a single individual. Rather it is a type. It is often possible to take up a point of view other than one's own, so the comprehension of such facts is not limited to one's own case. There is a sense in which phenomenological facts are perfectly objective: one person can know or say of another what the quality of the other's experience is. They are subjective, however, in the sense that even this objective ascription of experience is possible only for someone sufficiently similar to the object of ascription to be able to adopt his point of view — to understand the ascription in the first person as well as in the third, so to speak. The more different from oneself the other experiencer is, the less success one can expect with this enterprise."

"The distance between oneself and other persons and other species can fall anywhere on a continuum. Even for other persons the understanding of what it is like to be them is only partial, and when one moves to species very different from oneself, a lesser degree of partial understanding may still be available. The imagination is remarkably flexible. My point, however, is not that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat. I am not raising that epistemological problem. My point is rather that even to form a conception of what it is like to be a bat and a fortiori to know what it is like to be a bat, one must take up the bat's point of view."

"In speaking of the move from subjective to objective characterization, I wish to remain noncommittal about the existence of an endpoint, the completely objective intrinsic nature of the thing, which one might or might not be able to reach. It may be more accurate to think of objectivity as a direction in which the understanding can travel. And in understanding a phenomenon like lightning, it is legitimate to go as far away as one can from a strictly human viewpoint.But in the case of experience, on the other hand, the connexion with a particular point of view seems much closer. It is difficult to understand what could be meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from the particular point of view from which its subject apprehends it. After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat?"

"We appear to be faced with a general difficulty about psychophysical reduction. In other areas the process of reduction is a move in the direction of greater objectivity, toward a more accurate view of the real nature of things. … The less it depends on a specifically human viewpoint, the more objective is our description. …Experience itself, however, does not seem to fit the pattern. … If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity — that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint — does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us further away from it."

"Usually, when we are told that X is Y we know how it is supposed to be true, but that depends on a conceptual or theoretical background and is not conveyed by the 'is' alone. … But when the two terms of the identification are very disparate it may not be so clear how it could be true … and a theoretical framework may have to be supplied to enable us to understand this. Without the framework, an air of mysticism surrounds the identification.This explains the magical flavor of popular presentations of fundamental scientific discoveries, given out as propositions to which one must subscribe without really understanding them. For example, people are now told at an early age that all matter is really energy. But despite the fact that they know what 'is' means, most of them never form a conception of what makes this claim true, because they lack the theoretical background."

"That is what is meant, I think by the allegation that it is good simply to be alive, even if one is undergoing terrible experiences. The situation is roughly this: There are elements which, if added to one's experience, make life better; there are other elements which, if added to one's experience, make life worse. But what remains when these are set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. Therefore life is worth living even when the bad elements of experience are plentiful, and the good ones too meager to outweigh the bad ones on their own. The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its contents."

"I should not really object to dying if it were not followed by death."

"All of us, I believe, are fortunate to have been born."

"It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now."

"Leading a human life is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern."

"If we tried to rely entirely on reason, and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse — a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us."

"[A]bsurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics. … [I]t is possible only because we possess a certain kind of insight — the capacity to transcend ourselves in thought.If a sense of the absurd is a way of perceiving our true situation (even though the situation is not absurd until the perception arises), then what reason can we have to resent or escape it? … [I]t results from the ability to understand our human limitations. It need not be a matter of agony unless we make it so. Nor need it evoke a defiant contempt of fate that allows us to feel brave or proud. Such dramatics even if carried on in private, betray a failure to appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situation. If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair."

"A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental effort of will."

"All stages of sexual perception are varieties of identification of a person with his body. What is perceived is one's own or another's subjection to or immersion in his body. … In sexual desire and its expression the blending of involuntary response with deliberate control is extremely important. … In sexual desire the involuntary responses are combined with submission to spontaneous impulses: not only one's pulse and secretions but one's actions are taken over by the body; ideally, deliberate control is needed only to guide the expression of those impulses. … But the most characteristic feature of a specifically sexual immersion in the body is its ability to fit into the complex of mutual perception. … [S]exual desire leads to spontaneous interactions with other persons, whose bodies are asserting their sovereignty in the same way, producing involuntary reactions and spontaneous impulses in them. These reactions are perceived, and the perception of them is perceived, and that perception is in turn perceived; at each step the domination of the person by his body is reinforced, and the sexual partner becomes more possessible by physical contact, penetration [for the male], and envelopment [for the female]."

"[With regard to] the rather common general distinction between good and bad sex …, bad sex is generally better than none at all. This should not be controversial: it seems to hold for other important matters, like food, music, literature, and society. In the end, one must choose from among the available alternatives, whether their availability depends on the environment or on one's own constitution. And the alternatives have to be fairly grim before it becomes rational to opt for nothing."

"I believe that the general form of moral reasoning is to put yourself in other people's shoes. This leads to an impersonal concern for them corresponding to the impersonal concern for yourself that is needed to avoid a radical incongruity between your attitudes from the personal and impersonal standpoints, i.e. from inside and outside your life. Some considerable disparity remains, because your personal concern remains in relation to yourself and your life: they are not to be replaced or absorbed by the impersonal ones that correspond to them. (One is also typically concerned in a personal way for the interests of certain others to whom one is close.) But we derive moral reasons by forming in addition a parallel impersonal concern corresponding to the interests of all other individuals. It will be as strong or as weak, as comprehensive or as restricted, as the impersonal concern we are constrained by the pressures of congruency to feel about ourselves. In a sense, the requirement is that you love your neighbor as yourself; but only as much as you love yourself when you look at yourself from outside, with fair detachment."

"I do not believe that the source of value is unitary — displaying apparent multiplicity only in its application to the world. I believe that value has fundamentally different kinds of sources, and that they are reflected in the classification of values into types. Not all values represent the pursuit of some single good in a variety of settings."

"Human beings are subject to moral and other motivational claims of very different kinds. This is because they are complex creatures who can view the world from many perspectives — individual, relational, impersonal, ideal, etc. — and each perspective presents a different set of claims. Conflict can exist within one of these sets, and it may be hard to resolve. But when conflict occurs between them, the problem is still more difficult. Conflicts between personal and impersonal claims are ubiquitous. They cannot, in my view, be resolved by subsuming either of the points of view under the other, or both under a third. Nor can we simply abandon any of them. There is no reason why we should. The capacity to view the world simultaneously from the point of view of one's relations to others, from the point of view of one's life extended through time, from the point of view of everyone at once, and finally from the detached viewpoint often described as the view sub specie aeternitatis is one of the marks of humanity. This complex capacity is an obstacle to simplification."

"To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe."

"There will never be [a general and complete theory of right and wrong], in my view, since the role of judgment in resolving conflicts and applying disparate claims and considerations to real life is indispensable. Two dangers can be avoided if this idea of noncomprehensive systematization is kept in mind. One is the danger of romantic defeatism, which abandons rational theory because it inevitably leaves many problems unsolved. The other is the danger of exclusionary overrationalization, which bars as irrelevant or empty all considerations that cannot be brought within the scope of a general system admitting explicitly defensible conclusions. This yields skewed results by counting only measurable or otherwise precisely describable factors, even when others are in fact relevant. The alternative is to recognize that the legitimate grounds of decision are extremely various and understood to different degrees. This has both theoretical and practical implications."

"The ethical commonplaces of any period include ideas that may have been radical discoveries in a previous age. This is true of modern conceptions of liberty, equality, and democracy, and we are in the midst of ethical debates which will probably result two hundred years hence in a disseminated moral sensibility that people of our time would find very unfamiliar."

"Perhaps there is one chain [of inference] leading from the mental and the physical to a common source. It is conceivable in the abstract that if mental phenomena derive from the properties of matter at all, these may be identical at some level with nonphysical properties from which physical phenomena also derive. …If there were such properties, they would be discoverable only by explanatory inference from both mental and physical phenomena. … There would be properties of matter that were not physical from which the mental properties of organic systems were derived. This could still be called panpsychism."

"A feature of experience is subjective if it can in principle be understood only from one type of point of view: that of a being like the one having the experience, or at least like it in the relevant modality. The phenomenological qualities of our own experiences are subjective in this way. The physical events in our brains are not. Human physiologists may take a special interest in them; but they can, in principle, be understood just as well, or even better, by creatures totally unlike us in physical and mental structure. To understand them such creatures need not take up our point of view. Physical brain processes can be understood objectively, from the outside, because they are not subjective phenomena. And no description or analysis of the objective nervous system, however complete, will ever by itself imply anything which is not objective, i.e. which can be understood only from one kind of viewpoint, that of the being whose states are being described. One cannot derive a pour soi from an en soi."

"[T]he organism does not have a point of view: the person or creature does."

"[I]f things emerged from a spaceship which we could not be sure were machines or conscious beings, what we were wondering about would have an answer even if the things were so different from anything we were familiar with that we could never discover it. It would depend on whether there was something it was like to be them, not on whether behavioral similarities warranted our saying so. … [W]e need … to ask whether experience is present in [the] alien thing[s], … whether there is something it is like to be them, and … the answer to that question is what determines whether they are conscious."

"The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is incomplete, or the subjective involves illusions that should be rejected."

"What is more subjective is not necessarily more private. In general it is intersubjectively available. I assume that the intersubjective ideas of experience, of action, and of the self are in some sense public or common property. That is why the problems of mind and body, free will, and personal identity are not just problems about one's own case."

"The idealist tradition, including contemporary phenomenology, has of course admitted subjective points of view as basic and has gone to the opposite length of denying an irreducible objective reality. … I find the idealist solution unacceptable …: objective reality cannot be analyzed or shut out of existence any more than subjective reality can. Even if not everything is something from no point of view, some things are.The deep source of both idealism and its objectifying opposite is the same: a conviction that a single world cannot contain both irreducible points of view and irreducible objective reality — that one of them must be what there really is and the other somehow reducible or dependent on it. This is a very powerful idea. To deny it is in a sense to deny that there is a single world."

"[W]hen the objective gaze is turned on human beings and other experiencing creatures, who are undeniably parts of the world, it can reveal only what they are like in themselves. And if the way things are for these subjects is not part of the way things are in themselves, an objective account, whatever it shows, will omit something. So reality is not just objective reality, and the pursuit of objectivity is not an equally effective method of reaching the truth about everything."

"Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up."

"Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time."

"We assume that our own advances in objectivity are steps along a path that extends beyond them and beyond all our capacities. But even allowing unlimited time, or an unlimited number of generations, to take as many successive steps as we like, the process can never be completed. … What is wanted is some way of making the most objective standpoint the basis of action."

"Ethics increases the range of what it is about ourselves that we can will—extending it from our actions to the motives and character traits and dispositions from which they arise. We want to be able to will the sources of our actions down to the very bottom."

"Common sense doesn't have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded."

"The kind of worry I am talking about here—the worry about what’s left of the individual—moved Thomas Nagel, in The View from Nowhere, to reverse his own earlier defense of the publicity of reason, and to argue that some kinds of reasons are private or agent-relative after all. An agent has a special relationship to his own projects and own loved ones, and Nagel argued that, because of that relationship, the agent’s desires to engage in those projects and to promote the happiness of his loved ones are sources of reasons for him but not necessarily for anybody else."

"Not in the time of pleasure Hope doth set her bow; But in the sky of sorrow, Over the vale of woe. Through gloom and shadow look we On beyond the years! The soul would have no rainbow Had the eyes no tears."

"Who drives the horses of the sun Shall lord it but a day; Better the lowly deed were done, And kept the humble way."

"The rust will find the sword of fame, The dust will hide the crown; Ay, none shall nail so high his name Time will not tear it down."

"The happiest heart that ever beat Was in some quiet breast That found the common daylight sweet, And left to Heaven the rest."

"Oh, the moon is fair tonight along the Wabash, From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay; Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming On the banks of the Wabash, far away."

"I acknowledge the Furies. I believe in them. I have heard the disastrous beating of their wings."

"If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance."

"Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail."

"Liberalism, in the case of the Jew, means internationalism. If you listen to Jews discuss Jews, you will find they are money-minded, very sharp in practice. The Jews lack the fine integrity which at last is endorsed, and to a certain degree followed, by lawyers of other nationalities. The Jew has been in Germany for a thousand years, and he is still a Jew. He has been in America for all of 200 years, and he has not faded into a pure American by any means — and he will not."

"Shakespeare, I come!"

"Among the forces which sweep and play throughout the universe, untutored man is but a wisp in the wind. Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason. On the tiger no responsibility rests. We see him aligned by nature with the forces of life — he is born into their keeping and without thought he is protected. We see man far removed from the lairs of the jungles, his innate instincts dulled by too near an approach to free-will, his free-will not sufficiently developed to replace his instincts and afford him perfect guidance. He is becoming too wise to hearken always to instincts and desires; he is still too weak to always prevail against them. As a beast, the forces of life aligned him with them; as a man, he has not yet wholly learned to align himself with the forces. In this intermediate stage he wavers — neither drawn in harmony with nature by his instincts nor yet wisely putting himself into harmony by his own free-will. He is even as a wisp in the wind, moved by every breath of passion, acting now by his will and now by his instincts, erring with one, only to retrieve by the other, falling by one, only to rise by the other — a creature of incalculable variability. We have the consolation of knowing that evolution is ever in action, that the ideal is a light that cannot fail. He will not forever balance thus between good and evil. When this jangle of free-will and instinct shall have been adjusted, when perfect understanding has given the former the power to replace the latter entirely, man will no longer vary. The needle of understanding will yet point steadfast and unwavering to the distant pole of truth."

"A man, a real man, must never be an agent, a tool, or a gambler—acting for himself or for others—he must employ such. A real man—a financier—was never a tool. He used tools. He created. He led."

"She had no desire for accuracy, no desire for precise information. Innate sensuousness rarely has. It basks in sunshine, bathes in color, dwells in a sense of the impressive and the gorgeous, and rests there. Accuracy is not necessary except in the case of aggressive, acquisitive natures, when it manifests itself in a desire to seize. True controlling sensuousness cannot be manifested in the most active dispositions, nor again in the most accurate."

"The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions—none more so than the most capable."

"Literature, outside of the masters, has given us but one idea of the mistress, the subtle, calculating siren who delights to prey on the souls of men. The journalism and the moral pamphleteering of the time seem to foster it with almost partisan zeal. It would seem that a censorship of life had been established by divinity, and the care of its execution given into the hands of the utterly conservative. Yet there is that other form of liaison which has nothing to do with conscious calculation. In the vast majority of cases it is without design or guile. The average woman, controlled by her affections and deeply in love, is no more capable than a child of anything save sacrificial thought—the desire to give; and so long as this state endures, she can only do this. She may change—Hell hath no fury, etc.—but the sacrificial, yielding, solicitous attitude is more often the outstanding characteristic of the mistress; and it is this very attitude in contradistinction to the grasping legality of established matrimony that has caused so many wounds in the defenses of the latter. The temperament of man, either male or female, cannot help falling down before and worshiping this nonseeking, sacrificial note. It approaches vast distinction in life. It appears to be related to that last word in art, that largeness of spirit which is the first characteristic of the great picture, the great building, the great sculpture, the great decoration—namely, a giving, freely and without stint, of itself, of beauty."

"Few people have the sense of financial individuality strongly developed. They do not know what it means to be a controller of wealth, to have that which releases the sources of social action—its medium of exchange. They want money, but not for money's sake. They want it for what it will buy in the way of simple comforts, whereas the financier wants it for what it will control—for what it will represent in the way of dignity, force, power."

"The Irish are a philosophic as well as a practical race. Their first and strongest impulse is to make the best of a bad situation—to put a better face on evil than it normally wears."

"Parents are frequently inclined, because of a time-flattered sense of security, to take their children for granted. Nothing ever has happened, so nothing ever will happen. They see their children every day, and through the eyes of affection; and despite their natural charm and their own strong parental love, the children are apt to become not only commonplaces, but ineffably secure against evil. […] The astonishment of most parents at the sudden accidental revelation of evil in connection with any of their children is almost invariably pathetic. […] But it is possible. Very possible. Decidedly likely. Some, through lack of experience or understanding, or both, grow hard and bitter on the instant. They feel themselves astonishingly abased in the face of notable tenderness and sacrifice. Others collapse before the grave manifestation of the insecurity and uncertainty of life—the mystic chemistry of our being. Still others, taught roughly by life, or endowed with understanding or intuition, or both, see in this the latest manifestation of that incomprehensible chemistry which we call life and personality, and, knowing that it is quite vain to hope to gainsay it, save by greater subtlety, put the best face they can upon the matter and call a truce until they can think. We all know that life is unsolvable—we who think. The remainder imagine a vain thing, and are full of sound and fury signifying nothing."

"The conventional mind is at best a petty piece of machinery. It is oyster-like in its functioning, or, perhaps better, clam-like. It has its little siphon of thought-processes forced up or down into the mighty ocean of fact and circumstance; but it uses so little, pumps so faintly, that the immediate contiguity of the vast mass is not disturbed. Nothing of the subtlety of life is perceived. No least inkling of its storms or terrors is ever discovered except through accident."

"Most of the writers with whom I was most impressed were the French and Russian writers of another period. The one American writer who stood out to me was Richard Wright-and Dreiser. I took to their naturalism. I was able to understand so much of the country through them."

"Writers in the twenties reacted not only to the shock of the First World War but to the values held dear in the nineteenth century. The stock responses of good will and progressive enlightenment as an explanation of human behavior had failed Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson even before the First World War. The new attitudes were expressed not only in the realm of ideas but were implicit in the texture of the work, its language, its style, even in what came to be tagged "lack of style.""

"Meridel Le Sueur at fifteen had an introduction to one interpretation of "free love" herself, when attending a salon held by Mabel Dodge, a rich patron of radicals. ("Emma was good at getting rich women to give money.") At Meridel's first salon, "Theodore Dreiser spent the entire evening I was fifteen years old!-chasing me around the library." Meridel had read Dreiser's banned book, Sister Carrie. "He kept saying, don't you know who I am? and I said, yes, I thought you were the greatest author in the country but I didn't know you were a satyr!""

"Ever since W. A. Swanberg’s roguish portrait of the author of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy appeared in 1965, Theodore Dreiser’s reputation as the first great American novelist of the twentieth century and the “father of American realism” has been tarnished, if not obscured, by his reputation as a philanderer. Indeed, Dreiser himself is partly to blame because he was painfully honest in his autobiographies and personal statements; moreover, he sometimes boasted of his success with women. The problem has been further compounded by books written by many of his lovers and the publication of his American Diaries in 1983. The heaviest blow was probably dealt by Yvette Eastman in Dearest Wilding: A Memoir (1995), in which it is revealed that the fifty-eight-year-old Dreiser took the sixteen-year-old future author to bed at his country retreat in Mt. Kisco, New York. Two of the book’s illustrations show the virginal-looking (she had earlier been seduced by Max Eastman) Yvette at age seventeen and a foxy-looking Dreiser in front of one of the log cabins on his Mt. Kisco estate."

"Jerome Loving,"

"Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens—of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases so brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulfite. Here and there, as in parts of "The Titan" and again in parts of "A Hoosier Holiday," an evil conscience seems to haunt him and he gives hard striving to his manner, and more than once there emerges something that is almost graceful. But a backsliding always follows this phosphoresce of reform."

"H. L. Mencken, A Book of Prefaces (1917), 2nd edition, pp. 86–87. (1st edition, 1916)"

"Theodore Dreiser Should ought to write nicer."

"Dreiser wanted to write the next great American novel, and his desperation pervades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Carrie Sister Carrie like an unsavory pit stain."

"My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know...."

"You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment and make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race."

"It is now the scientific consensus that our risk-avoidance mechanism is not mediated by the cognitive modules of our brain, but rather by the emotional ones. This may have made us fit for the Pleistocene era. Our risk machinery is designed to run away from tigers; it is not designed for the information-laden modern world."

"Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave."

"We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible."

"Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions."

"It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear."

"Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal."

"Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance."

"Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools - by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category."

"Unlike a well-defined, precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality."

"[T]he epic poet did not judge heroes by the result... their fate depended on totally external forces... Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost."

"Mixing forecast and prophecy is symptomatic of randomness-foolishness..."

"I do not dispute that arguments should be simplified to their maximum... but people often confuse complex ideas that cannot be simplified into a media-friendly statement as symptomatic of a confused mind. ...MBAs tend to blow up in financial markets, as they are trained to simplify... beyond... requirement. (...I am myself the unhappy holder of the degree.)"

"[T]he mental probabilistic map in one's mind is so geared toward the sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news."

"From the standpoint of an institution, the existence of a risk manager has less to do with actual risk reduction than it has to do with the impression of risk reduction."

"In the early 1990s... I became addicted to the various Monte Carlo engines, which I taught myself to build... The dividend of the computer revolution... did not come in... e-mail messages and... chat rooms; it was in the sudden availability of fast processors capable of generating a million sample paths per minute."

"My models showed that ultimately almost nobody really survived; bears dropped like flies in the rally and bulls ended up being slaughtered... But there was one exception... option buyers... could buy the insurance against blowup..."

"I have two ways of learning from history: from the past, by reading the elders; and from the future, thanks to my Monte Carlo toy."

"A... vicious effect of... is that those that are good at predicting the past... think of themselves as good at predicting the future... [W]e live in a world where important events are not predictable..."

"[H]istory cannot lend itself to experimentation. But... is potent enough... to eventually bury the bad guy. Bad trades catch up with you... Mathematicians of probability give that a... name: '. [R]oughly... properties of a very... long sample path would be similar to the Monte Carlo properties of an average of shorter ones. ...Those unlucky... in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool... would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each ...would revert to his long-term properties."

"[A]ge is beauty. ...[M]y instinct is to value distilled thought over newer thinking, regardless of its apparent sophistication—another reason to accumulate the hoary volumes by my bedside... For an idea to have survived so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out. ...[P]rogress means that some new information is better than past information, not that the average of new information will supplant past information..."

"There are hordes of thoughtful journalists... [I]t is just that prominent media journalism is a thoughtless process of providing the noise that captures people's attention and there exists no mechanism for separating the two."

"I... found a significant advantage in selecting aged traders, using as a selection criterion their cumulative years of experience rather than their absolute success... [O]lder people have been exposed longer to the rare event and can be, convincingly, more resistant to it."

"Over a short time increment, one observes the variability of the portfolio, not the returns. ...[O]ne sees the variance, little else. ...Our emotions are not designed to understand the point. ...I deal with it by having no access to information. ...I prefer to read poetry."

"[N]ews... is full of noise and... history is largely stripped of it."

"A trader's mental construction should direct him to do precisely what other people do not do."

"Veteran trader Marty O'Connell calls this the firehouse effect. ...[F]iremen ...who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impartial observer would find ludicrous..."

"[A]t any point in time, the richest traders are often the worst traders. This I will call the cross-sectional problem: At a given time... the most successful traders are likely to be those fit for the latest cycle."

"[T]hey share the traits of the acute successful randomness fool who, in addition, operates in the most random of environments. ...[T]heir bosses and employers shared the same trait. They, too, are permanently out of the market."

"There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone."

"Just as an animal could have survived because its sample path was lucky... free of the evolutionary rare event, the "best" operators in a given business can... One vicious attribute is that the longer these... can go without encountering the rare event, the more vulnerable they will be to it. ...[S]hould one extend time to infinity, then by , that event will happen with certainty—the species will be wiped out! For evolution means fitness to... only one time series, not the average of all possible environments."

"Why do [people] confuse probability and expectation, that is, probability [vs.] probability times payoff? Mainly because much... schooling comes from examples in symmetric environments... the... bell curve... is entirely symmetric."

"I have organized my career and business in such a way as to... benefit... I am profiting from the rare event, with asymmetric bets."

"In most disciplines... asymmetry does not matter. ...People in most fields ...do not have problems eliminating extreme values from their sample, when the difference in payoff between different outcomes is not significant ...A professor ...removes the ...s, and takes the average of the remaining ones, without ...being ...unsound. A casual weather forecaster does the same ...So people in finance borrow the technique and ignore infrequent events, not knowing that the effect ...can bankrupt a company."

"Many scientists... are... subject to such foolishness... One flagrant example is... global warming... These scientists initially ignored the fact that these [high temperature] spikes, although rare, had the effect of adding disproportionately to the cumulative melting of the ice caps. ...[A]n event, although rare, that brings large consequences cannot be ignored."

"Sometimes market data becomes a simple trap; it shows you the opposite of its nature... [e.g.,] Currencies that exhibit the largest historical stability... are the most prone to crashes."

"I reject a sole time series of the past as an indication of future performance; I need a lot more than data."

"[W]e read too much into shallow recent history... but not from history in general [which] teaches us that things that never happened before do happen. ...outside of the narrowly defined time series; the broader the look, the better the lesson."

"[T]here is a category of traders who have inverse rare events, for whom volatility is often the bearer of good news. Those traders lose money frequently, but in small amounts, and make money rarely, but in large amounts. ...crisis hunters. I am happy to be one of them."

"Statistics... is all based on... the steady augmentation of the confidence level... [F]or an n times increase in sample size, we increase our knowledge by the square root on n. ...Where statistics ...fails us, is when we have distributions that are not symmetric... If there is a very small probability of finding a red ball in an urn dominated by black ones, then our knowledge about the absence of red balls will increase [even more] slowly. ...On the other hand, our knowledge of the presence of red balls will dramatically improve once one of them is found. This asymmetry in knowledge... is the central philosophical problem for... David Hume and Karl Popper."

"David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the black swan problem by... John Stuart Mill) No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion."

"Science had shifted, thanks to Bacon, into an emphasis on empirical observation. The problem is that, without a proper method, empirical observations can lead you astray. Hume came to... stress the need for some rigor in the gathering and interpretation of knowledge... epistemology... Hume is the first modern epistemologist... he was an obsessive skeptic and never believed... that a link between two items could be established as being causal."

"Maximizing the probability of winning does not lead to maximizing the expectation from the game when one's strategy may include , i.e., a small chance of a large loss and a large chance of a small win. If you engaged in a Russian Roulette-type strategy... you are likely to show up as the winner in almost all samples—except in the year when you are dead."

"[W]e like to emit logical and rational ideas but we do not enjoy this execution."

"What is easier to remember, a collection of facts glued together, or a story, something that offers a series of logical links? Causality is easier to commit to memory. ...What is induction exactly? ...It is very handy, as the general takes much less room in onel's memory than a collection of particulars. The effect of such compression is the reduction in the degree of detected randomness."

"I will use statistics and inductive methods to make aggressive bets, but I will not use them to manage my risks and exposure. ...[A]ll the surviving traders I know seem to have done the same. ...[T]hey make sure the cost of being wrong is limited ...they know ...which events would prove their conjecture wrong and allow for it ...They would then terminate their trade. This is called a stop loss ...I find it rarely practiced."

"A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point."

"I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns."

"I try to make money infrequently, as infrequently as possible simply because I believe that rare events are not fairly valued, and that the rarer the event, the more undervalued it will be in price."

"The major problem with inference... is that those whose profession it is to derive conclusions from data often fall into the trap faster and more confidently... The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it. For common wisdom... is to base... decision making on the following principle: It is very unlikely for someone to perform... well in a consistent fashion without doing something right. ...[I]f someone performed better... in the past then there is a great[er] chance of performing better than the crowd in the future... But... [a] small knowledge of probability can lead to worse results than no knowledge at all."

"[B]ecoming more rational, or not feeling the emotions of social slights, is not part of the human race... not with our current biology. There is no solace to be found from reasoning..."

"Optimism, it is said, is predictive of success. ...It can also be predictive of failure. Optimistic people... take more risks as they are overconfident of the about the odds; those who win show up among the rich and famous, others fail and disappear from the analysis."

"Let us use 10,000 fictional investment managers... [O]nce a manager has a single bad year, he is thrown out of the sample. ...[T]oss a coin; heads and the manager will make $10,000 over the year, tails and he will lose $10,000. ...We have, in a fair game, 313 managers who made money five years in a row. ...[I]f we throw one of these ...into the real world we would get ...comments on his remarkable style, his incisive mind... His biographer will dwell on ...a great mind in the making. ...[S]hould he stop performing (...his odds ...have stayed at 50%) they would start ...finding fault with his dissipated lifestyle. They will find something he stopped doing, and attribute his failure... The truth ...he simply ran out of luck."

"The information that a person derived some profit in the past... by itself, is neither meaningful nor relevant. We need to know the size of the population from which he came. If the initial population is 10,000 managers, I would ignore the results."

"Professor Karl Pearson... devised the first test of nonrandomness... He examined millions of runs of what was called a Monte Carlo (the old name for a roulette wheel)... He discovered... the runs were not purely random. ...Philosophers of statistics call this the reference case problem to explain that there is no true attainable randomness in practice, only in theory."

"Even the fathers of statistical science forgot that a random series is bound to exhibit some pattern... Pearson was among the first scholars interested in creating artificial random number generators, tables one could use as inputs for... simulations (precursors of our Monte Carlo simulator). ...[T]hey did not want these tables to exhibit... regularity. Yet real randomness does not look random! ...A single random run is bound to exhibit some pattern ..."

"At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead."

"Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive."

"We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract."

"Wittgenstein's ruler: "Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler." (page 224)"

"[E]conomists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality. (page 85)"

"[E]conomics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively. (page 257)"

"[In] economics... you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment. Now the spirit of such methods, called scientism by its detractors, continued into the discipline of finance as a few technicians thought their mathematical knowledge could lead them to understand markets. The practice of financial engineering came along with massive doses of pseudoscience. (page 115)"

"I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill."

"If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant."

"It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag, a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label "Lebanese," preferring the less restrictive "Levantine" designation."

"History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds."

"Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories."

"But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right."

"We tend to use knowledge as therapy."

"Consider that the turkey's experience may have, rather than no value, a negative value. It learned from observation, as we are all advised to do (hey, after all, this is what is believed to be the scientific method). Its confidence increased as the number of friendly feedings grew, and it felt increasingly safe even though the slaughter was more and more imminent. Consider that the feeling of safety reached its maximum when the risk was at the highest!"

"The casino is the only human venture I know where the probabilities are known, Gaussian (i.e., bell-curve), and almost computable."

"Probability is a liberal art; it is a child of skepticism, not a tool for people with calculators on their belts to satisfy their desire to produce fancy calculations and certainties."

"There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (...), and a random one (...). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing."

"Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients — and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish."

"Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average."

"Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making."

"The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death."

"One cannot assert authority by accepting one's own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge - we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers."

"While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information."

"Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause."

"This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters — you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity."

"Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks — when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur... I shiver at the thought."

"The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean."

"It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards."

"Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence.” Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them."

"Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab."

"Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control)."

"An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion."

"Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love."

"In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it."

"Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense."

"Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment."

"When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure."

"It’s harder to say no when you really mean it."

"Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry."

"You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative."

"People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse."

"The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane."

"Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules."

"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers."

"Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood."

"Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing."

"Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, , wisdom, , and this post-heroic absence of agitation."

"What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment."

"Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty."

"A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty."

"Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you."

"The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss."

"You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept."

"Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur."

"You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting."

"Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, elegant, robust and heroic life."

"Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse."

"Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed."

"They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box."

"The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one."

"You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits."

"Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura."

"What they call “play” (gym, travel, sports) looks like work."

"Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families."

"A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox."

"Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process."

"A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation."

"The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither."

"You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration."

"The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse."

"Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around."

"Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness."

"Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain."

"The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement."

"Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession."

"Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant."

"When conflicted between two choices, take neither."

"For the robust, an error is information."

"It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own."

"Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant."

"For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight."

"We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude."

"The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him."

"The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments."

"Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand."

"Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain—our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all."

"There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved."

"We are robust when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding of random effects do not lead to adverse outcomes —fragile otherwise."

"I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity’s phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism."

"To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly."

"I want to live happily in a world I don't understand."

"We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience."

"Simplicity is not so simple to attain."

"Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese."

"If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud."

"Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice; being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it."

"Compromising is condoning. The only modern dictum I follow one by George Santayana: A man is morally free when... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation."

"The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much."

"Half of life—the interesting half of life—we don't even have a name for."

"It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself."

"If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one."

"Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it."

"Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort."

"The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country."

"If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead."

"Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury."

"It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us—and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits."

"He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once."

"The antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility—and sacrifice—of the lower one."

"It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement."

"There is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)—likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher ..."

"This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing ..."

"Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system."

"When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free."

"Randomness works well in search—sometimes better than humans."

"Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant."

"[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have."

"Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility."

"Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner."

"What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get."

"A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion."

"My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking."

"Our greatest asset is the one we distrust the most: the built-in antifragility of certain risk-taking systems."

"The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses."

"I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are."

"An option hides where we don't want it to hide."

"[I]n academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world, there is."

"[I]t is about distortions of symmetry and reciprocity in life: If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price for your mistakes. ...If you give an opinion and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences."

"In case you are giving economic views: Don't tell me what you "think," just tell me what's in your portfolio."

"[N]ever engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it."

"You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. 'Educated philistines' have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets."

"The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us."

"Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions."

"Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice."

"Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a similar effect to encountering a drive-in Burger King while hiking in the middle of a national park."

"Evidence of submission is displayed by the employee’s going through years depriving himself of his personal freedom for nine hours every day, his ritualistic and punctual arrival at an office, his denying himself his own schedule, and his not having beaten up anyone on the way back home after a bad day. He is an obedient, housebroken dog."

"What we saw worldwide from 2014 to 2018, from India to the U.K. to the U.S., was a rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy League, Oxford-Cambridge or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think, and… 5) whom to vote for."

"People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones."

"If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life."

"Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later."

"Studying neurobiology to understand humans is like studying ink to understand literature."

"Taleb's distorted sense of social science leads him to make absolute absurd claims concerning the value of analytical modeling. For example, I have in my house ...a wall full of books on statistics and the history of statistics, books I never had the fortitude to burn or throw away; though I find them largely useless outside of their academic applications ...I cannot use them in class because I promised myself never to teach trash, even if dying of starvation." This is a completely incorrect assessment of the role of statistics in the social sciences. Statistical reasoning is quite central to all of social theory and the evaluation of evidence for and against particular social science models, including the evaluation of pharmaceuticals, modeling the demographics of disease, testing products for beneficial and harmful effects, and a host of others. Taleb's generalization from the weakness of standard financial economics to the whole of mathematical discipline is quite unwarranted. However, he does not stop there. All of academia is tarred with his brush of hypocrisy and irrelevance. "...almost all academic papers," he claims, "are made to bore, impress, provide credibility, intimidate even, be presented at meetings, but not to be read except by suckers (or detractors) or, even worse, graduate students." Note that he claims not simply that academic papers "bore," but that is what they are made for! And he claims that academic papers "are not to be read except by suckers"! Taleb's writing is filled with unsubstantiated and improbable statements of this type."

"Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?"

"Although I don't feel that it's at all necessary to tell you how I feel about the principle of individuality, I know that I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life expressing it one way or another, and I think that I'll accomplish more by expressing it on the keys of a typewriter than by letting it express itself in sudden outbursts of frustrated violence. I don't mean to say that I'm about to state my credo here on this page, but merely to affirm, sincerely for the first time in my life, my belief in man as an individual and independent entity. Certainly not independence in the everyday sense of the word, but pertaining to a freedom and mobility of thought that few people are able-or even have the courage-to achieve."

"If any part of it doesn’t seem to make sense, by all means call it to my attention. I’m not trying to send you out “on the road” in search of Valhalla, but merely pointing out that it is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. There is more to it than that— no one HAS to do something he doesn’t want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that’s what you wind up doing, by all means convince yourself that you HAD to do it. You’ll have lots of company."

"The hippies, who had never really believed they were the wave of the future anyway, saw the election results as brutal confirmation of the futility of fighting the establishment on its own terms. There had to be a whole new scene, they said, and the only way to do it was to make the big move — either figuratively or literally — from Berkeley to the Haight-Ashbury, from pragmatism to mysticism, from politics to dope... The thrust is no longer for "change" or "progress" or "revolution," but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been."

"Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people anyway. For years I've regarded his existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was absolutely humorless; I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn't quite reach the lever on the voting machine."

"The hard core, the outlaw elite, were the Hell's Angels... wearing the winged death's-head on the back of their sleeveless jackets and packing their "mamas" behind them on big "chopped hogs." They rode with a fine unwashed arrogance, secure in their reputation as the rottenest motorcycle gang in the whole history of Christendom."

"A man who has blown all his options can't afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can't afford to admit — no matter how often he's reminded of it — that every day of his life takes him farther and farther down a blind alley... Very few toads in this world are Prince Charmings in disguise. Most are simply toads... and they are going to stay that way... Toads don't make laws or change any basic structures, but one or two rooty insights can work powerful changes in the way they get through life. A toad who believes he got a raw deal before he even knew who was dealing will usually be sympathetic to the mean, vindictive ignorance that colors the Hell's Angels' view of humanity. There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency."

"Satan's Slaves, number three in the outlaw hierarchy, custom-bike specialists with a taste for the flesh of young dogs, flashy headbands and tender young blondes with lobotomy eyes."

"Tiny hurts people. When he loses his temper he goes completely out of control and his huge body becomes a lethal weapon. It is difficult to see what role he might play in the Great Society."

"But with the throttle screwed on, there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right... and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are the wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it... howling through a turn to the right, then to the left, and down the long hill to Pacifica... letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge... The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others- the living- are those who pushed their luck as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions."

"The streets of every city in America are filled with men who would pay all the money they could lay their hands on to be transformed, even for a day, into hairy, hard-fisted brutes who walk all over cops, extort drinks from terrified bartenders and roar out of town on big motorcycles after raping the banker's daughter."

"Women are terrified of being raped, but somewhere in the back of the womb there is one rebellious nerve end that tingles with curiosity whenever the word is mentioned."

"Any lawyer who says there's no such thing as rape should be hauled out to a public place by three large perverts and buggered at high noon, with all of his clients watching."

"My face looked like it had been jammed into the spokes of a speeding Harley, and the only thing keeping me awake was the spastic pain of a broken rib. It had been a bad trip. . . fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer. On my way back to San Francisco, I tried to compose a fitting epitaph. I wanted something original, but there was no escaping the echo of Mistah Kurtz' final words from the heart of darkness: "The horror! The horror!. . . Exterminate all the brutes!""

"He had done a few good sketches but so far we hadn’t seen that special kind of face that I felt we would need for the lead drawing. It was a face I’d seen a thousand times at every Derby I’d ever been to. I saw it, in my head, as the mask of the whiskey gentry — a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis; the inevitable result of too much inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture."

"One of the key genetic rules in breeding dogs, horses or any other kind of thoroughbred is that close inbreeding tends to magnify the weak points in a bloodline as well as the strong points. In horse breeding, for instance, there is a definite risk in breeding two fast horses who are both a little crazy. The offspring will likely be very fast and also very crazy. So the trick in breeding thoroughbreds is to retain the good traits and filter out the bad. But the breeding of humans is not so wisely supervised, particularly in a narrow Southern society where the closest kind of inbreeding is not only stylish and acceptable, but far more convenient — to the parents — than setting their offspring free to find their own mates, for their own reasons and their own ways. (“Goddam, did you hear about Smitty’s daughter? She went crazy in Boston last week and married a nigger!”)"

""Mayblossom Senility" (Steadman's phrase)...burnt out early or maybe just not much to burn in the first place. Not much energy in the faces, not much curiosity. Suffering in silence, nowhere to go after thirty in this life, just hang on and humor the children. Let the young enjoy themselves while they can. Why not?"

"My eyes had finally opened enough for me to focus on the mirror across the room and I was stunned at the shock of recognition. For a confused instant I thought that Ralph had brought somebody with him — a model for that one special face we’d been looking for. There he was, by God — a puffy, drink-ravaged, disease-ridden caricature … like an awful cartoon version of an old snapshot in some once-proud mother’s family photo album. It was the face we’d been looking for — and it was, of course, my own. Horrible, horrible …"

"Huge Pontiac Ballbuster blowing through traffic on the expressway. The journalist is driving, ignoring his passenger who is now nearly naked after taking off most of his clothing, which he holds out the window, trying to wind-wash the Mace out of it. His eyes are bright red and his face and chest are soaked with the beer he’s been using to rinse the awful chemical off his flesh. The front of his woolen trousers is soaked with vomit; his body is racked with fits of coughing and wild choking sobs. The journalist rams the big car through traffic and into a spot in front of the terminal, then he reaches over to open the door on the passenger’s side and shoves the Englishman out, snarling: “Bug off, you worthless faggot! You twisted pigfucker! (Crazed laughter.) If I weren’t sick I’d kick your ass all the way to Bowling Green — you scumsucking foreign geek. Mace is too good for you …. We can do without your kind in Kentucky.”"

"The slow-rising central horror of "Watergate" is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it."

"[On Richard Nixon] What we are looking at on all our TV sets is a man who finally, after 24 years of frenzied effort, became the President of the United States with a personal salary of $200,000 a year and an unlimited expense account including a fleet of private helicopters, jetliners, armored cars, personal mansions and estates on both coasts and control over a budget beyond the wildest dream of King Midas ... and all the dumb bastard can show us, after five years of total freedom to do anything he wants with all this power, is a shattered national economy, disastrous defeat in a war we could have ended four years ago on far better terms than he finally came around to, and a hand-picked personal staff put together through five years of screening, whose collective criminal record will blow the minds of high-school American History students for the next 100 years."

"[On Pat Buchanan] We disagree so violently on almost everything that it's a real pleasure to drink with him. If nothing else, he's absolutely honest in his lunacy — and I've found, during my admittedly limited experience in political reporting, that power & honesty very rarely coincide."

"It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes too close…"

"Jesus! How much more of this cheap-jack bullshit can we be expected to take from that stupid little gunsel? Who gives a fuck if he's lonely and depressed down there in San Clemente? If there were any such thing as true justice in this world, his rancid carcass would be somewhere down around Easter Island right now, in the belly of a hammerhead shark."

"I have never felt comfortable around people who talk about their feelings for Jesus, or any other deity for that matter, because they are usually none too bright... Or maybe "stupid" is a better way of saying it; but I have never seen much point in getting heavy with either stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don't bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I... And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots."

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

"To Richard Milhous Nixon, who never let me down."

"Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final."

"I returned to the Holiday Inn — where they have a swimming pool and air-conditioned rooms — to consider the paradox of a nation that has given so much to those who preach the glories of rugged individualism from the security of countless corporate sinecures, and so little to that diminishing band of yesterday's refugees who still practice it, day by day, in a tough, rootless and sometimes witless style that most of us have long since been weaned away from."

"The only other important thing to be said about Fear & Loathing at this time is that it was fun to write, and that's rare — for me, at least, because I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again — or else you'll be evicted, and that gets old. So it's a rare goddamn trip for a locked-in, rent-paying writer to get into a gig that, even in retrospect, was a kinghell, highlife fuck-all from start to finish... and then to actually get paid for writing this kind of manic gibberish seems genuinely weird; like getting paid for kicking Agnew in the balls. So maybe there's hope. Or maybe I'm going mad... In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward mobile — and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely... The Swine are gearing down for a serious workout this time around... So much, then, for The Road — and for the last possibilities of running amok in Las Vegas... Well, at least, I'll know I was there, neck deep in the madness, before the deal went down, and I got so high and wild that I felt like a two-ton Manta ray jumping all the way across the Bay of Bengal."

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?""

"No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough."

"Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."

"If the current polls are reliable... Nixon will be re-elected by a huge majority of Americans who feel he is not only more honest and more trustworthy than George McGovern, but also more likely to end the war in Vietnam. The polls also indicate that Nixon will get a comfortable majority of the Youth Vote. And that he might carry all fifty states... This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose... Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?"

"There was something... total... something very undermining about the McGovern defeat... There was a very unexplained kind of... ominous quality to it... weeping chaos. People you'd never expect to break down... stumbled off the plane in tears... It was such a shock to me that although I'd gone back to Washington to analyze... I saw how ripped up people were... I decided to hell with this... So I just went right around to the main terminal and got on another plane and went back to Colorado."

"The kids are turned off from politics, they say. Most of 'em don't even want to hear about it. All they want to do these days is lie around on waterbeds and smoke that goddamn marrywanna... yeah, and just between you and me Fred thats probably all for the best."

"Even that far-left radical bastard George S. McGovern — babbling a maddening litany of his most Far Out ideas — would be hard pressed to crank up a more than 30% animosity quotient."

"The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favour during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the acid era — but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover; a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything."

"A nervous blonde nymphet who thought that politics was some kind of game played by old people, like bridge."

"Anything that gets the adrenalin moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol... but too many adrenaline rushes in any given time span has the same effect on the nervous system as too many electro-shock treatments are said to have on the brain: after a while you start burning out the circuits. When a jackrabbit gets addicted to road-running, its only a matter of time before he gets smashed — and when a journalist turns into a politics junkie he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly understand."

"So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here — not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms."

"There is nothing so unusual, they tell me, about coming back to your car and finding the radio aerial torn off, the windshield wipers bent up in the air like spaghetti, and all the windows smashed... for no particular reason except to make sure you know just exactly where it's at these days. Where indeed?"

"The massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy."

"We've come to a point where every four years this national fever rises up — this hunger for the Saviour, the White Knight, the Man on Horseback — and whoever wins becomes so immensely powerful, like Nixon is now, that when you vote for President today you're talking about giving a man dictatorial power for four years. I think it might be better to have the President sort of like the King of England — or the Queen — and have the real business of the presidency conducted by... a City Manager-type, a Prime Minister, somebody who's directly answerable to Congress, rather than a person who moves all his friends into the White House and does whatever he wants for four years. The whole framework of the presidency is getting out of hand. It's come to the point where you almost can't run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip each other with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics."

"The ugly fallout from the American Dream has been coming down on us at a pretty consistent rate since Sitting Bull's time — and the only real difference now, with Election Day '72 only a few weeks away, is that we seem to be on the verge of ratifying the fallout and forgetting the Dream itself."

"Ed: Rip up the streets? HST: With jackhammers. Ed: With jackhammers?"

"Jesus man! You don't look for acid! Acid finds you when it thinks you're ready."

"There was a time, about ten years ago, when I could write like Grantland Rice. Not necessarily because I believed all that sporty bullshit, but because sportswriting was the only thing I could do that anybody was willing to pay for. And none of the people I wrote about seemed to give a hoot in hell what kind of lunatic gibberish I wrote about them, just as long as it moved. They wanted Action, Color, Speed, Violence..."

"How many times had he stood calmly back there on the duckboards and listened to respectable-looking people talk about raping the hotel penguins?"

"I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a raving beast. For me, that week in Chicago was far worse than the worst bad acid trip I'd even heard rumors about. It permanently altered my brain chemistry…"

"The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason."

"There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix — a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get..."

"Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish — a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow — to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested... Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll."

"It was Saturday night in America, and I felt like a native son."

"The concept of Ronald Reagan as a master Mole for the Aryan Nation has not taken hold yet, in the centers of political power. Even his closest people still see him as a profoundly talented old man from Hollywood who will go down in history as perhaps the greatest salesman of his time.... But not as a philosopher-king or a serious political think, like all of those other presidents that he frequently quotes. They view him more or less as they would view Willie Loman if he had wandered through the looking glass and became president of the United States."

"It is all well and good for children and acid freaks to still believe in Santa Claus — but it is still a profoundly morbid day for us working professionals. It is unsettling to know that one out of every twenty people you meet on Xmas will be dead this time next year... Some people can accept this, and some can't. That is why God made whiskey, and also why Wild Turkey comes in $300 shaped canisters during most of the Christmas season."

"There is a huge body of evidence to support the notion that me and the police were put on this earth to do extremely different things and never to mingle professionally with each other, except at official functions, when we all wear ties and drink heavily and whoop it up like the natural, good-humored wild boys that we know in our hearts that we are. … These occasions are rare, but they happen — despite the forked tongue of fate that has put us forever on different paths..."

"There are a lot of ways to practice the art of journalism, and one of them is to use your art like a hammer to destroy the right people — who are almost always your enemies, for one reason or another, and who usually deserve to be crippled, because they are wrong. This is a dangerous notion, and very few professional journalists will endorse it — calling it "vengeful" and "primitive" and "perverse" regardless of how often they might do the same thing themselves. "That kind of stuff is opinion," they say, "and the reader is cheated if it's not labelled as opinion." Well, maybe so. Maybe Tom Paine cheated his readers and Mark Twain was a devious fraud with no morals at all who used journalism for his own foul ends. And maybe H. L. Mencken should have been locked up for trying to pass off his opinions on gullible readers and normal "objective journalism." Mencken understood that politics — as used in journalism — was the art of controlling his environment, and he made no apologies for it. In my case, using what politely might be called "advocacy journalism," I've used reporting as a weapon to affect political situations that bear down on my environment."

"Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is. They are addicts, and they are guilty and they do lie and cheat and steal — like all junkies. And when they get in a frenzy, they will sacrifice anything and anybody to feed their cruel and stupid habit, and there is no cure for it. That is addictive thinking. That is politics — especially in presidential campaigns. That is when the addicts seize the high ground. They care about nothing else. They are salmon, and they must spawn. They are addicts."

"John F. Kennedy … murdered in Dallas by some hapless geek named Oswald who worked for either Castro, the mob, Jimmy Hoffa, the CIA, his dominatrix landlady or the odious, degenerate FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. The list is long and crazy — maybe Marilyn Monroe's first husband fired those shots from the grassy knoll. Who knows? A whole generation of American journalists is still embarrassed by their failure to answer that question. JFK's ghost will haunt the corridors of power in America for as long as the grass is green and the rivers run to the sea. Take my word for it, Bubba. I have heard his footsteps for 30 years and I still feel guilty about not being able to explain the biggest news story of my lifetime to my son."

"No candidate will risk being linked with a "suspected" addict — but a registered, admitted addict is a whole different thing. As long as I'd confessed, I was okay. Nobody really cared about the countless criminal addictions that preyed on me day and night — just as long as I was not in denial. That was the key. As long as they knew that I knew I was sick and guilty, I was safe."

"If you consider the great journalists in history, you don't see too many objective journalists on that list. H. L. Mencken was not objective. Mike Royko, who just died. I. F. Stone was not objective. Mark Twain was not objective. I don't quite understand this worship of objectivity in journalism. Now, just flat-out lying is different from being subjective."

"Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long. You can't be objective about Nixon."

"These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern — but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum."

"He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time."

"If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin."

"Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful."

"Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream."

"Hopes rise and dreams flicker and die. Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday. Life is beautiful and living is pain. The sound of music floats down a dark street."

"You'd be surprised at the things people will do in order to get their names or pictures in the paper."

"Ah, fortune and fame shall follow me...and I shall dwell in the world of the chosen for a few moments of fleeting ecstasy; ere the seven burly lads turn into creditors and hustle me off to debtors' prison at last."

"They say that "he who flies highest, falls farthest" — and who am I to argue? But we can't forget that "he who doesn't flap his wings, never flies at all". And with that, I'll stop trying to convince myself that I can't fail; how dull the whole thing would be if that were true."

"(Just heard Gen. White's proclamation that we "have Russia zeroed in from all directions." I am waiting now for Vannevar Bush and Ed Teller to announce that our new supersensitive radar picked up a rash of heart tremors from the direction of the USSR, immediately after White's remarkably insignificant statement, I could almost hear Karl Marx laughing in his tomb.)"

"But fie on these unanswered queries and fie on those who pose them. There are stories to be written, drinks to be drunk, women to be ravished, and … alas, money to be made. We shall ride the bouncing ball and fight gamely to avoid being on the bottom when it bounces. … that is all ye know and all ye need to know. Amen."

"Events of the past two years have virtually decreed that I shall wrestle with the literary muse for the rest of my days. And so, having tasted the poverty of one end of the scale, I have no choice but to direct my energies toward the acquisition of fame and fortune. Frankly, I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left me."

"I may sound a little black, but I'm really pretty well adjusted."

"A man has to BE something; he has to matter."

"A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance."

"I find that by putting things in writing I can understand them and see them a little more objectively. … For words are merely tools and if you use the right ones you can actually put even your life in order, if you don't lie to yourself and use the wrong words."

"Sacrificing good men to journalism is like sending William Faulkner to work for Time magazine."

"Platitudes are safe, because they're easy to wink at, but truth is something else again."

"There is at this moment a beetle the size of god's ass on the table about six inches from the t-writer. It is worse than anything Kafka ever dreamed, so big I can see its eyes and the hair on its legs — jesus, suddenly it leaped off and now circles me with a menacing whir."

"Once I establish credit, I may be able to function. A man needs credit. Especially when he has no money."

"Something new is wanted. A new novel, perhaps. Something the ten-percenters don't have their hooks into yet. Those soul-fuckers should all be killed."

"Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception — especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they are scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence."

"Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles — a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other — that kept me going."

"The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories — not of things I have done but of things I have failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back."

"I had come to regard him as a loner with no real past and a future so vague there was no sense talking about it."

"Disgusting as he usually was, on rare occasions he showed flashes of stagnant intelligence. But his brain was so rotted with drink and dissolute living that whenever he put it to work it behaved like an old engine that had gone haywire from being dipped in lard."

"What passed for society was a loud, giddy whirl of thieves and pretentious hustlers, a dull sideshow full of quacks and clowns and philistines with gimp mentalities."

"By the time we got to the street, I could see the first rays of the sun, a cool pink glow in the eastern sky. The fact that I’d spent all night in a cell and a courtroom made that morning one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. There was a peace and brightness about it, a chilly Caribbean dawn after a night in a filthy jail. I looked out at the ships and the sea beyond them, and I felt crazy to be free with a whole day ahead of me. Then I realized I would sleep most of the day, and my excitement disappeared."

"“I like this place” he said with a grin “I like to sit up here and look down at the beach and think of all the good things I could do with a Luger.”"

"If I had a Luger, I thought, I could drill the bastards. I leaned on one elbow and pointed a finger at the window, seeing what kind of shot I would get. Perfect. There was just enough light in the street for a good silhouette. I knew it would happen quickly, I’d have no choice: just pull the trigger and go deaf from the terrible noise, a frenzy of screaming and scratching followed by a ghastly thump of a body knocked back and down to the sidewalk."

"It was the kind of town that made you feel like Humphrey Bogart: you came in on a bumpy little plane, and, for some mysterious reason, got a private room with a balcony overlooking the town and the harbor; then you sat there and drank until something happened. I felt a tremendous distance between me and everything real."

"I sat there for a long time, and thought about a lot of things. Foremost among them was the suspicion that my strange and ungovernable instincts might do me in before I had a chance to get rich. No matter how much I wanted those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction — toward anarchy, poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas goat."

"The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who see it coming and jump aside."

"Sometimes at dusk, when you were trying to relax and not think of the general stagnation, the Garbage God would gather a handful of those choked-off morning hopes and dangle them somewhere just out of reach; they would hang in the breeze and make a sound like delicate glass bells, reminding you of something you never quite got hold of, and never would."

"The stewardess reached down to fasten Bloor's seatbelt. I saw his left arm snake out and settle affectionately around her shoulders. Good God! I thought. This is it. I could see the headlines in tomorrow's News. But the stewardess only smiled and backed off a few steps, dismissing Bloor's crude advance with a slap at his arm and an icy professional smile. I tried to return it, but my face was not working properly."

"Jesus, I thought, I am ripped right straight to the tits. Where am I? Are we going up or down? Somewhere in the back of my brain, I knew I was sitting in a jeep in the parking lot of a night club on an island off the Mexican coast — but how could I really be sure, with another part of my brain apparently convinced that I was looking down on the huge glittering bowl of Los Angeles from the cockpit of a 727? Was that the Milky Way? Or Sunset Boulevard? Orion, or the Beverly Hills Hotel?"

"Suddenly I was tired of Lotterman; he was a phony and he didn't even know it. He was forever yapping about freedom of the press and keeping the paper going, but if he'd had a million dollars and all the freedom in the world he'd still put out a worthless newspaper because he wasn't smart enough to put out a good one. He was just another noisy little punk in the great legion of punks who marched between the banners of bigger and better men. Freedom, Truth, Honour — you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other. I stood up. "Ed," I said using his name for the first time, "I believe I'll quit.""

"There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure that Al Gore would never be President of the United States, no matter what the experts were saying — and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida. It was Nonsense, said the Candidate, Utter nonsense. . . Anybody who believed Bush had lost Florida was a Fool. The Media, all of them, were Liars & Dunces or treacherous whores trying to sabotage his victory. . . Here was the whole bloody Family laughing & hooting & sneering at the dumbness of the whole world on National TV. The old man was the real tip-off. The leer on his face was almost frightening. It was like looking into the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth. The sheep's fate was sealed, and so was Al Gore's."

"The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives."

"It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy … We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows?"

"This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed — for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it. Now."

"The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now. The party's over, folks. . . [Censorship of the news] is a given in wartime, along with massive campaigns of deliberately-planted "Dis-information". That is routine behavior in Wartime — for all countries and all combatants — and it makes life difficult for people who value real news."

"This blizzard of mind-warping war propaganda out of Washington is building up steam. Monday is Anthrax, Tuesday is Bankruptcy, Friday is Child-Rape, Thursday is Bomb-scares, etc., etc., etc... If we believed all the brutal, frat-boy threats coming out of the White House, we would be dead before Sunday. It is pure and savage terrorism reminiscent of Nazi Germany."

"The city's frightening now. That's the basis of my reaction to Las Vegas. It's not the city I wrote about. It's not the same place at all. You'll notice that even the — what do you call them? — milestone or trademark casinos are now gone."

"It ain't much, but it's the only weapon we have against the Greedheads."

"Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it."

"But speaking of rules, you've been arrested dozens of times in your life. Specific incidents aside, what's common to these run-ins? Where do you stand vis-à-vis the law? "Goddammit. Yeah, I have. First, there's a huge difference between being arrested and being guilty. Second, see, the law changes and I don't. How I stand vis-à-vis the law at any given moment depends on the law. The law can change from state to state, from nation to nation, from city to city. I guess I have to go by a higher law. How's that? Yeah, I consider myself a road man for the lords of karma.""

"We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear — fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer."

"It is hard to ignore the prima facie dumbness that got us bogged down in this nasty war in the first place. This is not going to be like Daddy's War, old sport. He actually won, and he still got run out of the White House nine months later.. . The whole thing sucks. It was wrong from the start, and it is getting wronger by the hour."

"What the hell is going on here? How could this once-proud nation have changed so much, so drastically, in only a little more than two years. In what seems like the blink of an eye, this George Bush has brought us from a prosperous nation at peace to a broke nation at war."

"But wow! This goofy child president we have on our hands now. He is demonstrably a fool and a failure, and this is only the summer of '03. The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. . . The Bush family must be very proud of themselves today, but I am not. Big Darkness, soon come. Take my word for it."

"The utter collapse of this Profoundly criminal Bush conspiracy will come none too soon for people like me... The massive plundering of the U.S. Treasury and all its resources has been almost on a scale that is criminally insane, and has literally destroyed the lives of millions of American people and American families. Exactly. You and me, sport — we are the ones who are going to suffer, and suffer massively. This is going to be just like the Book of Revelation said it was going to be — the end of the world as we knew it."

"I had a truly horrible dream last night … [Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mike Tyson and I] were on our way to a TV studio for a debate about his long-time working friendship with the powerful Bush family from Texas and how it might affect the next Bush presidency when The Terminator seizes power in Sacramento and tries to hand over the state's 54 electoral votes by election day in 2004. That is the basic plan behind Schwarzenegger running. He doesn't want to be Governor, he just wants the electoral votes to go to Bush this time."

"Why are we seeing George Bush on TV every two hours for nine or ten days at a time, like some kind of mutated Mr. Rogers clone? Something is dangerously wrong in any country where a monumentally-failed backwoods politician can scare our national TV networks so totally that they will give him anything he wants."

"I take no pleasure in being Right in my dark predictions about the fate of our military intervention in the heart of the Muslim world. It is immensely depressing to me. Nobody likes to be betting against the Home team."

"If we get chased out of Iraq with our tail between our legs, that will be the fifth consecutive Third-world country with no hint of a Navy or an Air Force to have whipped us in the past 40 years."

"Is it possible that he has already abandoned all hope of getting re-elected? Or does he plan to cancel the Election altogether by declaring a national military emergency with terrorists closing in from all sides, leaving him with no choice but to launch a huge bomb immediately?. . . Desperate men do desperate things, and stupid men do stupid things. We are in for a desperately stupid summer."

"For myself, I would much prefer to be stuck with Kentucky in the NCAA Tournament, than stuck with George Bush in the White House. It is the difference between losing your wallet at a cock fight and losing all your credit cards forever, along with your job and your house and your ability to earn enough money to pay off your sports-gambling debts or even a six-pack on game day. . ."

"The 2004 presidential election will be a matter of life or death for the whole nation. We are sick today, and we will be even sicker tomorrow if this wretched half-bright swine of a president gets re-elected in November."

"Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these Abu Ghraib photographs did."

"These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected. I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line. Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport."

"There was no time for scholarly details, and, besides, I have always believed that a man can fairly be judged by the standards and taste of his choices in matters of high-level plagiarism."

"Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oil-mongers. He hates music, football and sex, in no particular order, and he is no fun at all."

"Today, the Panzer-like Bush machine controls all three branches of our federal government, the first time that has happened since Calvin Coolidge was in the White House. And that makes it just about impossible to mount any kind of Congressional investigation of a firmly-entrenched president like George Bush. The time has come to get deeply into football. It is the only thing we have left that ain't fixed."

"I had a soft spot in my heart for Ronald Reagan, if only because he was a sportswriter in his youth, and also because his wife gave the best head in Hollywood."

"If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up."

"Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors."

"Football season is over. No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt."

"When I went into the clinic last April 30, George Bush was about 50 points ahead of his closest Democratic opponent in next year's Presidential Election. When I finally escaped from the horrible place, less than three weeks later, Bush's job-approval ratings had been cut in half — and even down into single digits, in some states — and the Republican Party was panicked and on the run. It was a staggering reversal in a very short time, even shorter than it took for his equally crooked father to drop from 93 percent approval, down to as low as 43 percent and even 41 percent in the last doomed days of the first doomed Bush Administration. After that, he was Bill Clinton's punching bag."

"Richard Nixon could tell us a lot about peaking too early. He was a master of it, because it beat him every time. He never learned and neither did Bush the Elder."

"But wow! This goofy child president we have on our hands now. He is demonstrably a fool and a failure, and this is only the summer of '03. By the summer of 2004, he might not even be living in the White House. Gone, gone, like the snows of yesteryear."

"The Rumsfeld-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America."

"Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent."

"Paranoia is just another word for ignorance."

"I shit on the chest of Fun."

"We shit on the chest of Weird."

"Music has always been a matter of energy to me, a question of fuel. Sentimental people call it inspiration, but what they really mean is fuel. I have always needed fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio."

"I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours."

"The only difference between the Sane and the Insane, is IN and yet within this world, the Sane have the power to have the Insane locked up."

"All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, pussy, or opium pipes, and people seem to like it that way."

"We are like pygmies lost in a maze of haze. We are not at war, we are having a nervous breakdown,again."

"I understand that fear is my friend, but not always. Never turn your back on fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed."

"The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic."

"We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world, a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we'll kill you. Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us; they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them."

"Now, years later, I still have trouble when I think about Chicago ('68). That week at the Convention changed everything I'd ever taken for granted about this country and my place in it... Everytime I tried to tell somebody what happened in Chicago I began crying , and it took me years to understand why... Chicago was the End of the Sixties, for me."

"It was wonderful, a stunning happy ending to what began as just another tragic rock & roll story, as if Bob Dylan had been arrested in Miami for jacking off in a seedy little XXX theater while stroking the spine of a fat young boy."

"I was also drunk, crazy and heavily armed at all times. People trembled and cursed when I came into a public room and started screaming in German."

"I knew a Buddhist once, and I've hated myself ever since. The whole thing was a failure."

""I don't deny his lifestyle, because his lifestyle was pretty extreme," Anita Thompson told The Associated Press, but that lifestyle was made possible by his success as a reporter and writer, not the other way around. In her new book, The Gonzo Way: A Celebration of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Thompson says her husband built his career with a tireless dedication to the craft of reporting, a keen awareness of his own shortcomings and his personal blend of patriotism: loving his country while mistrusting authority. … Her book, published by Fulcrum Publishing, depicts the man who used the pseudonym Raoul Duke in his famous Fear and Loathing as a relentless researcher and a voracious reader. He viewed politics as both worthy and necessary to get things done, the book says, and he believed nothing could be accomplished without friends and allies. "The Hunter I want people to understand is hardworking, righteous and a patriot — a bedrock patriot and loyal to his country and loyal to his friends," Anita Thompson said. Even his most savage political commentary was written in hopes of inspiring change: "He believed we were better than what we were electing." Thompson also knew his faults and either compensated for them or harnessed them, his widow said. He thought he was lazy, so he worked hard. He could be angry and violent, so he poured that energy onto the page."

"Hunter was wearing a medallion, almost like an Al Sharpton medallion. He didn’t talk a lot at dinner, but when I got up from the table to leave, he hugged me so hard the medallion pressed into me and really hurt. Then he gave me the Dunhills and stared at me intensely. I knew he was going to die . . . There was only one cigarette in the pack, and I still have it today. Obviously I’d never smoke it."

"No one took the voice of the journalist further away from ‘neutral background’ (or seemed less able to stop himself doing it) than Hunter S. Thompson. Even at the start of his career, he was no believer in journalistic neutrality. … Certainly Thompson is a peculiarly misshapen sort of moralist, one who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him. Sometimes he's just ugly for the sake of it. This means that at times in The Proud Highway he comes over as an out-and-out asshole, whining about money, boring people about his unpublished novels, making a drunken fool of himself and generally using the facilities and not cleaning up afterwards."

"Hunter was an enigma all his life. He puzzled his mother, who wondered why he did the things he did. But she understood that her eldest son had magnetism. After he became famous, she was saying his charisma was there all along, although he was difficult from the moment of his birth. Life as Hunter Thompson's mother was no weenie roast. He was a pain in the ass. He was fearless. He was cruel, but also capable of great kindness. He was a loyal friend. Near the end, he was frequently sentimental. Sometimes brusque and rude, he could also be a courtly southern gentleman. Virginia Thompson had worked overtime to raise sons with good manners."

"A lightning rod for controversy, his antics were often portrayed by lesser men as mere self-aggrandizement, but they served a much grander purpose. He elevated an ideal, a towering lighthouse with a brilliant guiding flame for those who decided, like himself and his predecessors, to live their lives to the absolute fullest, consequences be damned. There was always a powerful comfort in knowing he was out there somewhere in the night, roaring drunk, guzzling high-octane whiskey and railing against a world amok with complacency and hypocrisy. There was always a weird sense that he could pop up any where at any time to stick it to The Man and set things straight. Sometimes he appeared a force of nature, other times a Homeric hero capable of conjuring excitement and purpose from the most innocuous of circumstances. Hunter didn’t have to seek out adventure, he was adventure. Which often meant dancing with death. Most men spend their entire lives avoiding that jig, but the good Doctor sought it out, he seemed to possess a keen understanding of the song’s deadly rhythm and he boogied down with the fucker."

"Hunter made such a splash when he appeared on the literary scene because no one had ever seen anything like it. His sharp, unforgiving prose surged across the page and he seemed strangely willing to insert himself into the story to the degree that he became the story. Instead of observing from the sidelines, he preferred to jump into the game and look for the truth from the midst of the action. Of course, there are certain risks involved with that sort of behavior. He managed to make a host of enemies along the way, infuriating elements running the gamut from the Hells Angels to Richard Nixon. Not that he seemed to mind. He knew it came with the territory — that if you wanted the real story you had to take risks."

"We delight in the beauty of butterfly, rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty*"

"I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me "I love you." … There is an African saying which is: "Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.""

"Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable."

"A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. ... Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent."

"Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest."

"Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends."

"There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing."

"I am capable of what every other human is capable of. This is one of the great lessons of war and life."

"Nothing can dim the light that shines from within"

"My life has been long, and believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things, sometimes trembling, but daring, still…You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them. Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud. Do not complain. Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution. Never whine. Whining lets a brute know that a victim is in the neighborhood. Be certain that you do not die without having done something wonderful for humanity. I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish-speaking, Native American and Aleut. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all. Here is my offering to you."

"There are certain artists who belong to all the people, everywhere, all the time. The list of singers, musicians, and poets must include David the harpist from the Old Testament, Aesop the Storyteller, Omar Khayyam the Tent Maker, Shakespeare the Bard of Avon, Louis Armstrong the genius of New Orleans, Om Kalsoum the soul of Egypt, Frank Sinatra, Mahalia Jackson, Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles...Celia Cruz...All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us all that we are more alike than we are unalike."

"When people show you who they are, believe them, the first time. Not the 29th time!"

"You did in your twenties what you knew how to do, and when you knew better you did better. And you should not be judged for the person that you were, but for the person that you're trying to be and the woman that you are now."

"All information belongs to everybody all the time. It should be available. It should be accessible to the child, to the woman, to the man, to the old person, to the semiliterate, to the presidents of universities, to everyone. It should be open."

"My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style."

"How important it is to recognise and consider our heroes and she-roes."

"I'm an American, and most of the time proud of it. Even when I am displeased with what my country is doing, I am still an American who is displeased. And fortunately, being an American, I don't have to whimper, I don't have to whine, I have the right to protest, and I like that."

"You develop courage, the most important of all the virtues, because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently. If you've seen another truth and had enough courage to change your way of thinking, to say "Hey everybody, you know what I said last week? I don't believe that anymore. A little child just straightened me out.""

"This a wonderful day. I've never seen this one before"

"Develop enough courage so that you can stand up for yourself and then stand up for somebody else."

"I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, "You know, that's the truth. I wasn't there, and wasn't a six-foot black girl, but that's the truth.""

"The needs of a society determine its ethics."

"You don't have to think about doing the right thing. If you're for the right thing, then you do it without thinking."

"At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice."

"I believe most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise."

"Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives."

"Life is going to give you just what you put in it. Put your whole heart in everything you do, and pray, then you can wait."

"Many people wonder where my secret lies, I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model size. When I try to show them they think I'm telling lies. I say, it's in the reach of my arms, the span of my hips, the stride of my step, the curl of my lips I'm Woman, Phenominally . I walk in a room just as cool as you please, And to a man the fellows stand, or fall down on their knees. And then they swarm around me; a hive of honey bees. I say, oh it's the fire in my eyes, the flash of my teeth, the swing in my waist, the joy in my feet. Men themselves have wondered what they see in me. They try so much but they can't touch my inner mystery. When I try to show them they say they still can't see. I say oh, it's in the arch of my back. And now you understand just why my head's not bowed. I don't shout or jump about, or have to talk too loud. When you see me walking out it ought to make you proud. I say it's in the click of my heels. The bend of my hair. The palm of my hands. The need for my care, because I'm a woman. Phenomenally. Phenomenal Woman. That's my mother, and all your mothers. And then my grandmothers. And all your grandmothers. And my great grandmothers, And all your great grandmothers. And my great great great, And all your great great... And all you women here, And me."

"You were a precious pearl How I loved to see you shine, You were the perfect girl. And you were mine. For a time. For a time. Just for a time."

"You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I'll rise."

"You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I'll rise."

"Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I've got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs?"

"Out of the huts of history's shame I rise Up from a past that's rooted in pain I rise I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide."

"Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise."