"All right, all right, all right," she said with a sigh, "let's hear the story of life in a blinding flash." "The wreckers against the builders!" said Elmer. "There's the whole story of life!" "And I've got more news for you." "Yes?" piped Ivy. "I am not going to help the wreckers," said Elmer. "My son and I are builders."

"But listen: If anyone here should wind up on a gurney in a lethal-injection facility, maybe the one at Terre Haute, here is what your last words should be: "This will certainly teach me a lesson.""

"And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to the names of persons who have checked out those titles."

"If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."

"We've sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I wish we hadn't. I hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer show."

"It is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln. He always steals the show."

"Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals."

"Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes."

"You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff. You're not expecting it."

"I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.""

"Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be."

"A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap."

"If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favorite joke."

"We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different."

"While we were being bombed in Dresden, sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one slider said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, "I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight." Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it."

"[America's soldiers] are being treated … like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."

"We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding."

"If you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington DC."

"The highest treason in the USA is to say Americans are not loved, no matter where they are, no matter what they are doing there."

"Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn't the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard."

"Socialism is no more an evil word than Christianity. Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve."

"I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex."

"Humor is an almost physiological response to fear."

"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."

"[Vietnam] only made billionaires out of millionaires. [Iraq] is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress."

"My father said "When in doubt, castle.""

"Old Norwegian Proverb: Swedes have short dicks but long memories."

"Is it possible that seemingly incredible geniuses like Bach and Shakespeare and Einstein were not in fact superhuman, but simply plagiarists, copying great stuff from the future?"

"If God were alive today, he would have to be an atheist, because the excrement has hit the air-conditioning big time, big time."

"What is it, what can it possibly be about blowjobs and golf?"

"During the Vietnam War, Abbie Hoffman announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if this was true or not."

"Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?"

"George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography."

"Don't spoil the party, but here's the truth: We have squandered our planet's resources, including air and water, as though there were no tomorrow, so now there isn't going to be one. So there goes the Junior Prom, but that's not the half of it."

"Requiem:The crucified planet Earth, should it find a voice and a sense of irony, might now well say of our abuse of it, "Forgive them, Father, They know not what they do."The irony would be that we know what we are doing.When the last living thing has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, "It is done." People did not like it here."

"And now I want to tell you about my late Uncle Alex. He was my father's kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, If this isn't nice, I don't know what is. So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

"Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler."

"Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!"

"My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.""

"Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?"

"War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun."

"In case you haven't noticed, we … dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class. Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything. Piece of cake."

"In case you haven't noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were."

"One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us."

"Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on."

"I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other."

"So let's give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That'll teach bin Laden a lesson he won't soon forget."

"If you want to take my guns away from me, and you're all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you're for the poor, you're a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you're a conservative. What could be simpler?"

"I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren't crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls' basketball. Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative."