Satirists From The United States

"There is a strain of the left that is really invested in show trials and purity testing and virtue signaling... And would rather lose surrounded by perfect allies than win with an army that includes imperfect allies."

"My proof that homosexuality is not a choice? A question for my straight male readers: Is there anything I could do or say or write that would convince you to willingly, happily, eagerly, anxiously, deliriously, lustfully put my dick in your mouth and leave it there until I had an orgasm? I rest my case."

"Natural isn't something I get called a lot in Texas."

"Every American may have equal access to ice cream, but there's no guarantee that the outcome of eating ice cream will be equal."

"Yes, we must donate and volunteer and protest and vote, all while reminding ourselves daily that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. And we must commit to defending our friends, neighbors, and coworkers who are immigrants (documented or not), Muslims (American born, immigrants, or refugees), people of color, women seeking reproductive health care, trans men and women seeking safety, lesbian and gay men seeking to protect their families, and everyone and everything else Trump has threatened to harm, up to and including the planet we all live on."

"Saying someone—like our president-elect—couldn't possibly be into piss because that particular kink doesn't square with a known character trait and/or aspect of his public persona is like saying a hard-driving male CEO would never pay a dominatrix to tie him up, humiliate him, and shove two dozen needles through the head of his cock because he's such a powerful guy. Or saying a feminist would never wanna have her ass slapped or her hair pulled by a male sex partner. Or saying an out-and-proud gay man would never wanna be called a faggot by the dude fucking his ass. While most powerful CEOs aren't BDSM subs and most feminists aren't into having their asses slapped and their hair pulled and most out-and-proud gay men aren't into being called faggots when they're bottoming, [...] enough of all three are for each to be a cliché."

"There's nothing the rightwing loves more than a black person willing to say black people are the real racists or a queer person willing to say queer people are the real threat. If you're queer or a person of color and you're telegenic and articulate and willing to sell the rancid cum rag that passes for your soul, you'll never have to do an honest day's work again in your life."

"There is a Karmic Rule of Kink (KROK), and it goes something like this: "Dump the honest foot fetishist and you will marry the dishonest necrophiliac." Break up with a guy over his relatively tame fetish — and a foot fetish is about as tame as they get — and KROK will make sure your next boyfriend is some lying corpsefucker who tells you only what you want to hear. ("Honestly, honey, I only like live girls!") Only after you've married the corpsefucker and had a few kids — once extricating yourself from the marriage becomes a hugely complicated ordeal — will he ask you to lie in a tub of ice until you're good and cold. And when you're lying in that tub of ice — and odds are you will, because you won't want to put your poor kids through a divorce — you'll remember that sweet, harmless foot fetishist whose heart you broke back in college, the man you could have married."

"The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means that each of us is free to go our own way, even if the ways some of us may choose to go seem sinful or shocking to our fellow citizens."

"One man's piss-soaked sadomasochistic orgy is another man's poetic ecstasy."

"The butt is not a magical place that only gay people can visit, like a leather bar or the Liberace Museum."

"Who's more reputable than Dan Savage? I can think of a few hundred million people on the North American continent alone. But, hey, so long as my Wikipedia page—which, for the record, I did not author and only found out about when a web-savvy youngster brought it to my attention—features that hyperflattering photo of me, I'm happy to do my part for them."

"But just because we're conditioned to view some things as disgusting and immoral doesn't mean that some things aren't, in actual point of fact, disgusting and immoral. Human sacrifice, for instance. Or cannibalism. Or Ann Coulter."

"We don't say to women, "what do you mean you had a three way with two girls and a guy and you ate her pussy a little bit. You must be a lesbian." But we say to guys, "you mean you [touched a dick]. You must be a fag."… Straight male sexuality is all about this paranoia about am I feminine or am I gay. So the man who allows himself to do something perceived as womanly or faggoty is not a man anymore."

"Seattle sucks. New York and Chicago are real cities. Seattle is Dubuque, Iowa, putting on airs. People here think Seattle is Paris... it ain't. I've been to Paris, and this place isn't Paris."

"Despite what Pope Benedict would have us believe, sex without love can be fucking amazing."

"What is it that separates human beings from the so called lower animals? Well as I see it, it's exactly one half dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism — as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glow-worms or raccoons — Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake. Now, since those are the features that define a human being, it follows that the extent to which someone is lacking in those qualities is the extent to which he or she is less than human. Capisce?"

"And what would our ideas of God, of religion, be like if they had come to us through the minds of women? Ever think of that?"

"In the end, we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that's being continually retold in an accent too thick and too strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke. The soul is its punchline."

"There's birth, there's death, and in between there's maintenance."

"On the poor use of grammar It's a matter of usage. If a house is off-plumb and rickety and lets in the wind, you blame the mason, not the bricks. Our words are up to the job. It's our syntax that's limiting."

"Nostalgia's nice enough in little bitty doses, it puts personal peach fuzz on the hard ass of history."

"The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy."

"I’m acquainted with a, uh, gentleman who claims that the extent to which a society focuses on the needs of its lowest common denominator is the extent to which that society’ll be mired in mediocrity. Whereas, if we would aim the bulk of our support at the brightest, most talented, most virtuous instead, then they would have the wherewithal to solve a lot of our problems, to uplift the whole culture, enlighten it or something, so that eventually there wouldn’t be so many losers and weaklings impeding evolution and dragging the whole species down. He claims that martyrs like you just perpetuate human misery by catering to it. He believes individuals have to take responsibility for their own lives and accept the consequences of their choices."

"You can love ‘em till your well runs dry, Belford, but you can never love ‘em enough, and you know it. No matter how much others might love you, you can’t love yourself unless you’re in charge of your own actions, and you’ll never take charge as long as you can get away with blaming your shortcomings and misfortunes on your family or society or your race or gender or Satan or whatever…"

"All Uncle Larry is saying is that individuals have to accept responsibility for their own bad choices. If every time we choose a turd, society, at great expense, simply allows us to redeem it for a pepperoni, then not only will we never learn to make smart choices, we will also surrender the freedom to choose, because a choice without consequences is no choice at all. Maybe it boils down to the premium we want to place on liberty."

"In this room, the salamander was squashed between the pages of the rhyming dictionary, thereby changing poetry forever. Here, Salome walked around with a big red fish held high up over her head. Old Father spanked her with a ballet slipper, sending her to bed without milk or honey. Dance was changed in this room, too."

"So this, then, is the chamber of the hootchy-kootch. Its bathtub full of orchids. Its closet full of smoke."

"People of zee wurl, Relax!"

"Moreover, given the unpleasant option of having to associate with either the self-satisfied beautiful or the self-pitying plain, he'd choose the former every time because beauty could sometimes transcend smugness whereas self-pity just made ugliness all the more unattractive."

"Your friend insults the homeless by giving them no credit for having made the decisions that shaped their lives, and demeans them further by declaring them powerless to alter their situations. There’re many ways, my dear, to victimize people. The most insidious way is to persuade them that they’re victims."

"Night, when tangos play on the nurse's radio and rat poison sings its own hot song behind the cellar door. Night, when the long snake feeds, when the black sedan cruises the pleasure districts, when neon flickers "Free at Last" in a dozen lost languages, and shapes left over from childhood move furtively behind the moon-dizzy boughs of the fir."

"There's no such thing as security in this life, sweetheart; and the sooner you accept that fact, the better off you'll be. The person who strives for security will never be free. The person who believes that she's found security will never reach paradise. What she mistakes for security is purgatory. You know what purgatory is, Gwendolyn? It's the waiting room, it's the lobby. Not only does she have the wrong libretto, she's stuck in the lobby where she can't see the show."

"Midnight, when the monotonous tick-tock of diurnal progress is for one throbbing moment replaced by the cool but smokey honk of a saxophone, alternately seductive and threatening. Midnight. The black growth on the clock face that has to be biopsied every twenty-four hours to see whether it is malignant or benign."

"Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them 'deadlines'."

"It's a smile a girl could bring home to mother, if she had a mother; a smile a girl could pet like a pony, sip like a lemonade, hum like a popular tune; a smile a girl would feel safe with in a dark alley."

"keep your eye on the ball, even if you cannot see the ball."

"...that she was the one who'd made friends with the Snake, that she'd let it lick the blood of her first menstruation, that she … ooo eee, that she … ooo eee, that she … ooo, eee, that she now knew what the Serpent knew."

"A person can't make a career out of somebody else's invective."

"Not naive," Conch Shell had corrected him, "He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear."

"...she recreated the mountains not as she had originally seen them but as she eventually chose to perceive them, not only a capacity to observe the world but a capacity to alter his or her observation of it — which, in the end, is the capacity to alter the world, itself. Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call "sages," and those who act upon it, we call "artists.""

"The winter passed as slowly and peacefully as a boa constrictor digesting a valium addict."

"In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak."

"Suppose the neutral angels were able to talk to Yahweh and Lucifer — God and Satan, to use their popular titles — into settling out of court. What would be the terms of the compromise? Specifically, how would they divide the assets of their earthly kingdom? Would God be satisfied to take loaves and fishes and itty-bitty thimbles of Communion wine, while allowing Satan to have the redeye Gravy, eighteen ounce New York steak, and buckets of chilled champagne? Would God really accept twice-a-month lovemaking for procreative purposes and give Satan the all-night, no-holds-barred, nasty "can't-get-enough-of-you" hot-as-hell fucks?"

"Leave me in the night but please don't leave me in the dark"

"Of the seven deadly sins, lust is definitely the pick of the litter."

"There are landscapes in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky is invariably immense. There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stops and space commenses, and should we find ourselves on a particular prairie or mountaintop at a particular hour [...] our relationship with sky thins and loosens while our connection with space becomes as solid as bone."

"It couldn't have been Pan's output alone because Alobar's testicles were as flat and juiceless as trampled grapes."

"The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously."

"...to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on heaven is to create hell."