"I understand why other people would want to stay in B&Bs. They're pretty. They're personal. They're “quaint,” a polite way of saying “no TV.” They are “romantic,” i.e., every object large enough for a flower to be printed on it is going to have a flower printed on it. They're “cozy,” meaning that a guest has to keep her belongings on the floor because every conceivable flat surface is covered in knickknacks, except for the one knickknack she longs for, a remote control."

"Violet: (singing) Shhh…"

"The true American patriot is by definition skeptical of the government."

"In these fast and fickle times, it’s nice to know that there are some things you can always count on: the enduring brilliance of the last page of The Great Gatsby; the near-religious harmonies of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls”; and the lifelong friendship of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck."

"Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't?"

"Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much."

"Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know."

"...Clemenza's overriding responsibility is to his family. He takes a moment out of his routine madness to remember that he had promised his wife that he would bring dessert home. His instruction to his partner in crime is an entire moral manifesto in six little words: 'Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.'"

"Frank Sinatra is the first punk... punk comes out of nowhere... punk is... a rumor that spreads... that guts and perseverence mean more than anything else..."

"...the huge Jackson Pollock canvas that is the U.S.A.: vast, murky, splotched and slapped together by a drunk."

"I talk about going to his Inauguration and smiling when he took the oath, 'cause I was so afraid he was going to "wreck the economy and muck up the drinking water"… the failure of my pessimistic imagination at that moment boggles my mind now."

"[Martin Luther King, Jr.] concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the 'loving your enemies' sermon this way: "So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you,'I love you. I would rather die than hate you.'" Go ahead and reread that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.""

"Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between."

"You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality."

"I fear that the consumer who buys a Confederate flag coffee cup, which she will then put on her American flag place mat, is the sort of sophisticated thinker who is open-minded enough that she is capable of hating blacks and Arabs at the same time."

"I haven't decided if he deserved to eat bread made out of sticks or live in a rancid puddle, probably because I haven't made up my mind whether anyone deserves such treatment, though I suspect that the day a person gives up on the Geneva Conventions is the day a person gives up on the human race."

"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."

"No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets."

"The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny."

"Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion."

"Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart."

"According to the current doctrines of mysticoscientism, we human animals are really and actually nothing but "organic patterns of nodular energy composed of collocations of infinitesimal points oscillating on the multi-dimensional coordinates of the space-time continuum." I'll have to think about that. Sometime. Meantime, I'm going to gnaw on this sparerib, drink my Blatz beer, and contemplate the a posteriori coordinates of that young blonde over yonder, the one in the tennis skirt, tying her shoelaces."

"From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm."

"Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues."

"The plow has probably done more harm — in the long run — than the sword."

"Business: Busyness."

"Among politicians and businessman, Pragmatism is the current term for "To hell with our children.""

"Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper."

"There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed."

"With the neutron bomb, which destroys life but not property, capitalism has found the weapon of its dreams."

"The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses."

"Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins."

"One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill."

"Most academic economists know nothing of economy. In fact, they know little of anything."

"When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble."

"As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth."

"'A pessimist is simply an optimist in full possession of the facts.'"

"'Don't let yourself become cynical. Cynicism is a cheap emotion, a craven substitute for thought and action. Cynicism corrodes the will, dulls the conscience, blunts your sense of right and wrong... Stay alert to fine distinctions: become a pessimist like me.'"

"'There is no situation so bad that the cops can't make it worse.'"

"I am delighted, one more time, by the daring of my species and the audacity of our flying machines. There is poetry and music in our technology, a beauty as touching as that of eagle, moss campion, raven or yonder limestone boulder shining under the Arctic sun."

"There's beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere."

"I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie."

"If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred? Human vanity alone? Contempt for the natural world implies contempt for life. The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature."

"Beyond the wall of the unreal city … there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it. And then — May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God's dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night."

"I would give ten years off the beginning of my life to see, only once, Tyrannosaurus rex come rearing up from the elms of Central Park, a Morgan police horse screaming in its jaws. We can never have enough of nature."

"Love can defeat that nameless terror. Loving one another, we take the sting from death. Loving our mysterious blue planet, we resolve riddles and dissolve all enigmas in contingent bliss."

"[Concerning river runners:] If we were going into war again I can't think of any I'd rather have on our side. I mean, all of these good men and women. And if they were on the other side I'd join the other side."

"Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second."

"The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons, where the support and sustenance of the human animal is incidental. If man in his newfound power and vanity persists in the attempt to remake the planet in his own image, he will succeed only in destroying himself — not the planet. The earth will survive our most ingenious folly."

"The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders."