Essayists From The United States

"Leave it to “worthy causes”? That is thin gruel, my friend. Most of such money is sopped up by administration, i.e., eaten by parasites."

"“But every man is entitled to his own opinion!” Perhaps. Certainly every man had his own opinion on everything, no matter how silly. On two subjects the overwhelming majority of people regarded their own opinions as Absolute Truth, and sincerely believed that anyone who disagreed with them was immoral, outrageous, sinful, sacrilegious, offensive, intolerable, stupid, illogical, treasonable, actionable, against the public interest, ridiculous, and obscene. The two subjects were (of course) sex and religion. On sex and religion each American citizen knew the One Right Answer, by direct Revelation from God. In view of the wide diversity of opinion, most of them must necessarily have been mistaken. But on these two subjects they were not accessible to reason. “But you must respect another man’s religious beliefs!” For Heaven’s sake, why? Stupid is stupid—faith doesn’t make it smart. I recall one candidate’s promise that I heard during the presidential campaign of 1976, a campaign promise that seems to me to illustrate how far American rationality head skidded. “We shall drive ever forward along this line until all our citizens have above-average incomes!” Nobody laughed."

"But there seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously—after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important…so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be both ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth."

"I am not much interested in killing strangers. I am not opposed to the death penalty—I voted for it every time the matter came to a vote, which was frequently during the decline and fall of the United States—but in killing pour le sport I need to be emotionally involved. Oh, forced to a choice I would rather shoot a man than a deer; I can’t see the “sport” and shooting a gentle vegetarian that can’t shoot back. But, given full choice, I would rather watch television than kill a stranger. Some, at least."

"The few VIPs I’ve met struck me as hollow shells, animated by PR men."

"Eventually I learned that the Church is run solely for the benefit of the priesthood, not for the good of our people. But I learned it too late."

"“I don’t recommend disturbing either corpses or golfers.” “There’s a difference?”"

"Father had told me, “Widows are far better than brides. They don’t tell, they won’t yell, they don’t swell, they rarely smell, and they’re grateful as hell."

"A feature that struck my eye was an abundance of built-in bookcases…added later, it seemed to me, except a pair of small ones flanking the fireplace in the family room. Most houses didn’t even have that much, as most people don’t read. (Before the twentieth century was out that could be worded, “—most people can’t read.” One of the things I learned in studying the histories of my home planet and century on various time lines was that in the decline and fall that took place on every one of them there was one invariant: illiteracy. In addition to that scandalous flaw, on three time lines were both drug abuse and concurrent crime in the streets, plus a corrupt and spendthrift government. My own time line had endless psychotic fads followed by religious frenzy; time line seven had continuous wars; three time lines had collapse of family life and marriage—but every time line had loss of literacy…combined with—riddle me this—more money per student spent on education than ever before in each history. Never were so many paid so much for accomplishing so little. By 1980 the teachers themselves were only semiliterate.)"

"“Why don’t they modernize?” I answered, “Money. Donald, any question that starts out ‘Why don’t they—’ the answer is always ‘Money.’”"

"Long ago Mr. Clemens demonstrated in his essay “What is man?” that every one of us acts at all times in his own interest. Once you understand this, it offers a way to negotiate with an antagonist in order to find means to cooperate with him for mutual benefit. But if you are convinced of your own “altruism” and you try to shame him out of his horrid selfishness, you will get nowhere."

"“Gratitude”: An imaginary emotion that rewards an imaginary behavior, “altruism.” Both imaginaries are false faces for selfishness, which is a real and honest emotion."

"But how many men are truly wise in their handling of women? In all history you can count them on the fingers of one thumb."

"No intelligent man has any respect for an unjust law. Nor does he feel guilt over breaking it. He simply follows the Eleventh Commandment."

"Population pressure works much like a rising river. You can put up dikes or levees, but the day comes when the river has to go somewhere."

"Marriage is not a sometime thing; it’s whole hawg or you’re not married."

"The potential for religious hysteria has always been present in the American culture, and this I knew, as my father had rubbed my nose in it from an early age. Father had pointed out to me that the only thing that preserved religious freedom in the United States was not the First Amendment and was not tolerance…but was solely a Mexican standoff between rival religious sects, each sect intolerant, each sect the sole custodian of the “One True Faith”—but each sect a minority that gave lip service to freedom of religion to keep its own “One True Faith” from being persecuted by all the other “True Faiths.”"

"America in my own time line suffered the cancer of “Bread and Circuses” but found a swifter way to commit suicide. I don’t boast about the difference, as in time line two the people of the United States succumbed to something even sillier than Bread and Circuses: the people voted themselves a religious dictatorship."

"I don’t understand time line three (code Neil Armstrong) so I had better quote Jubal Harshaw. who lived through it. “Mama Maureen,” he said to me, “the America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. Perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of other citizens…which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it…which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’ “‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome. Jubal shrugged and looked sad. “Mine was a lovely world—until the parasites took over.”"

"But, like theology, metaphysics has no answers. Just questions. But what lovely questions!… Metaphysics has polysyllabic words for all of these ideas but you don’t have to use them; Anglo-Saxon monosyllables do just as well for questions that have no answers. Persons who claim to have answers to these questions invariably are fakers after your money. No exceptions. If you point out their fakery, if you dare to say aloud that the emperor has no clothes, they will lynch you if possible, always from the highest of motives."

"Circular reasoning can’t get you out of this dilemma. Pointing to something (the physical world) and asserting that it has to have a Creator and this Creator necessarily has such-and-such attributes proves nothing save that you have made certain assertions without proof. You have pointed at a physical thing, the physical world; you have asserted that this thing has to have a “Creator” (Who told you that? What’s his mailing address? Who told him?). But to assert that something physical was created out of nothing—not even empty space—by a thingamajig you can’t point to is not to make a philosophical statement or any sort of statement, it is mere noise, amphigory, sound and fury signifying nothing. Jesuits take fourteen years to learn to talk that sort of nonsense. Southern fundamentalist preachers learn to talk it in a much shorter time. Either way, it’s nonsense."

"What is a “concrete” word? It is a spell-symbol used to tag something you can point to and thereby agree on, e. g., “cat,” “sailboat,” “ice-skating”—agree with such certainty that when you say “sailboat’’ there is no chance whatever that I will think you mean a furry quadruped with retractile claws. With the spell symbol “God” there is no way to achieve such agreement because there is nothing to point to."

"Professor Huxley introduced me to the fact that [[theology] is a study with no answers because it has no subject matter. No subject matter? That’s right, no subject matter whatever—just colored water with artificial sweetening."

"You can’t do it all the time, but there is no limit to how much you can talk about it."

"Be a pessimist and you will hardly ever be wrong."

"On June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, Serbia, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated. He was Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an otherwise useless piece of royalty, and to this day I have never been able to understand why this event could cause Germany to invade Belgium a month later."

"“How you behave toward cats here below determines your status in Heaven.” “Really?” “That’s straight out of the Bible; you can look it up.”"

"“Happiness,” Jubal stated, “lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing.”"

"There is something about gold that has an effect on human judgment similar to that of heroin or cocaine."

"In a society in which it is a mortal offense to be different from your neighbors your only escape is never to let them find out."

"Father always required me to think for myself, and Mr. Clemens urged me to, also. I was taught that the one Unforgivable Sin, the offense against one’s own integrity, was to accept anything at all simply on authority."

"I am not running down contraception; it’s the greatest boon to women in all history, as efficient contraception frees women from that automatic enslavement to men that has been the norm through all histories. But the ancient structure of our female nervous systems is not tuned to contraception; it is tuned to getting pregnant."

"But it is no joke to attend the funeral of a dear friend, dead in her golden youth because her baby killed her. I was at such a funeral in the twenties and heard a sleek old priest talk about “God’s will.” At the graveside I managed to back away from the coffin such that I got him proper in his instep with a sharp heel. When he yelped, I told him it was God’s will."

"And for the first time both of us were bare all over and it was wonderful and I knew that all my life had just been preparation for this moment."

"No, I did not decide I was in love with him, after all. Enough men had had me by then that I was not inclined to mistake a hearty orgasm for eternal love."

"What he did have was a loud voice and no respect for tyrants. Tyrants hate people like that."

"Now look carefully at what I said. I said that I know that these things are asserted. I did not say that they are true."

"Father had long since cured me of any belief in the Apostles’ Creed. In its place I held a deep suspicion, planted by Professor Huxley and nurtured by father, that no such person as Jesus of Nazareth had ever lived. As for Brother Timberly, I regarded him as two yards of noise, with his cracks filled with unction. Like many preachers in the Bible Belt, he was a farm boy with (I strongly suspected) a distaste for real work. I did not and do not believe in a god up there in the sky listening to Brother Timberly’s words."

"We are strangers, all of us, family most of all."

"A proud self image is the strongest incentive you can have toward correct behavior."

"“I said God but you know what I mean!” “I do indeed. You are indulging in theology; I would rather see you take laudanum. Maureen, when anyone talks about ‘God’s will’ or ‘God’s intentions’ or Nature’s intentions if he is afraid to say ‘God,’ I know at once that he is selling a gold brick. To himself, in some cases, as you were just doing.”"

"Censorship is never logical but, like cancer, it is dangerous to ignore it when it shows up."

"“What code should I follow, father?” “You have to pick your own.” “The Ten Commandments?” “You know better than that. The Ten Commandments are for lame brains. The first five are solely for the benefit of the priests and the powers that be; the second five are half truths, neither complete nor adequate.”"

"Remember that ancient Persian parable about doubling grains of rice on a chessboard? Four billion people are a smidgen larger than a grain of rice; you quickly run out of chessboard."

"Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat. (needs chapter and page reference, please)"

"Women and cats do what they do; there is nothing a man can do about it."

"Quantum mechanics and Schrödinger’s cat tossed out the clockwork world of 1890 and replaced it with a fog of probability in which anything could happen. Of course the intellectual class did not notice this for many decades, as an intellectual is a highly educated man who can’t do arithmetic with his shoes on, and is proud of the lack."

"Protocol is either useful or it should be abolished."

"Billiards will never replace sex, or even tomatoes."

"“The answer to ‘Why’ is always ‘Money.’”"