"The brainless serenity of charwomen and janitors working late at night came over us. In a messy world we were at least making our little corner clean."

"I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: "Nothing.""

"God never wrote a good play in His life."

""Now I will destroy the whole world." ... It’s what Bokonists always say when they are about to commit suicide."

"When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed."

"I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done." "Nice going, God!" "Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have." "I feel very unimportant compared to You." "The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around."

"I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific."

"I agree with one Bokononist idea. I agree that all religions, including Bokononism, are nothing but lies."

"Science is magic that works."

"“It is not possible to make a mistake,” she assured me. I did not know that this was a customary greeting given by all Bokononists when meeting a shy person. So, I responded with a feverish discussion of whether it was possible to make a mistake or not."

"Pay no attention when I laugh .. I'm a notorious pervert in that respect."

"“Maturity,” Bokonon tells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”"

"I learned of the Bokononists cosmogony .. wherein Borasisi, the sun, held Pabu, the moon, in his arms, and hoped Pabu would bear him a fiery child. But poor Pabu gave birth to children that were cold, that did not burn; and Borasisi threw them away in disgust. Those were the planets who circled their terrible father at a safe distance. Then poor Pabu herself was cast away, and she went to live with her favourite child, which was Earth. Earth was Pabu’s favorite because it had people on it; and the people looked up to her and loved her and sympathised. And what opinion did Bokonon hold of his own cosmogony? "Foma! Lies!" he wrote. "A pack of foma!""

"He had made me feel as though my own free will were as irrelevant as the free will of a piggy-wig arriving at the Chicago stockyards."

"If he keeps going at his present rate, working night and day, the number of people he’s saved will equal the number of people he let die – in the year 3010."

"Little Newt snorted. “Religion!” “Beg your pardon?” Castle said. “See the cat?” asked Newt. “See the cradle?”"

"Her glissandi spoke of heaven and hell and all that lay in between. Such music from such a woman could only be the case of schizophrenia or demonic possession."

"My God — life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?" "Don't try," [Castle] said. "Just pretend you understand."

"Tiger got to hunt, Bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, "Why, why, why?"Tiger got to sleep, Bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand."

"“Well, when it became evident that no governmental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies."

"Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing."

"People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say."

"No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's..." "And?" "No damn cat, and no damn cradle."

"Every greedy, unreasonable dream I’d ever had about what a woman should be came true in Mona. There, God love her warm and creamy soul, was peace and plenty forever."

"The San Lorenzan National Anthem. Its melody was "Home on the Range." The words had been written in 1922 by Lionel Boyd Johnson, by Bokonon. The words were these: "Oh, ours is a land / Where the living is grand, / And the men are fearless as sharks; / The women are pure, / And we always are sure / That our children will all toe their marks. / San, San Lo-ren-zo! / What a rich, lucky island are we! / Our enemies quail, / For they know they will fail / Against people so reverent and free.""

"He reported his avocation as: “Being alive.” He reported his principal occupation as: “Being dead.”"

"A pissant is somebody who thinks he’s so damn smart, he never can keep his mouth shut. No matter what anybody says, he’s got to argue with it. You say you like something, and, by God, he’ll tell you why you’re wrong to like it. A pissant does his best to make you feel like a boob all the time. No matter what you say, he knows better."

"Never had I seen a human being better adjusted to such a humiliating physical handicap. I shuddered with admiration."

"Never index your own book."

"It was the belief of Bokonon that good societies could be built only by pitting good against evil, and by keeping tension between the two high at all times."

"Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s really going on."

"The highest possible form of treason," said [Horlick] Minton, "is to say that Americans aren't loved wherever they go, whatever they do. Claire tried to make the point that American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love." "I guess Americans are hated a lot of places." "People are hated a lot of places. Claire pointed out ... that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty. But the loyalty board didn't pay any attention to that. All they knew was that Claire and I both felt that Americans were unloved."

"Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier."

"... I was very upset about how Americans couldn’t imagine what it was like to be something else, to be something else and proud of it."

"The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!"

"[Hazel Crosby's] obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows - and any nation, anytime, anywhere. As Bokonon invites us to sing along with him: If you wish to study a granfalloon Just remove the skin of a toy balloon."

"My second wife had left me on the grounds that I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with."

"The room seemed to tip, and its walls and ceiling and floor were transformed momentarily into the mouths of many tunnels – tunnels leading in all directions through time. I had a Bokononist vision of the unity in every second of all time and all wandering mankind, all wondering womankind, all wondering children."

"“She said his mind was turned to the biggest music there was, the music of the stars.”"

"“Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.”"

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

"Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is."

"It’s a small world," I observed. "When you put it in a cemetery, it is."

"We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon ... "If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass." At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, "Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass." By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries. It is as free form as an amoeba."

"As Bokonon says: "Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.""

"[Lyman Enders] Knowles was insane, I’m almost sure – offensively so, in that he grabbed his own behind and cried, ‘Yes, yes!’ whenever he felt that he'd made a point."

"Nothing in this book is true. "Live by the foma* that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy." — The Books of Bokonon 1:5 *Harmless untruths"

"There was one [conversation with Dr. Hoenikker] where he bet I couldn't tell him anything that was absolutely true. So I said to him, 'God is love' ... He said, 'What is God? What is love? Baby don’t hurt me, Baby don’t hurt me, no more.’"

"I don't think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they're talking about secrets they've been told or haven't been told. They're talking about intimate things, family things, love things ... Dr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren't the main things with him. ... Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth. ... I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person."