…legal procedure has always tacitly been concerned with human relations, rather than abstract justice, and that consequently in spite of the legal codes it is really the human relations underneath that determine the verdicts in...

The little bit you and me might change the world,” Malloy smiled, “it wouldnt show up until a hundred years after we were dead. We’d never see it.””But it’d be there.

Everybody talks about freedom, citizens,” the big man said gently, seeming to draw upon that very sure source of personal knowledge again, “but they dont really want it. Half of them wants it but the...

Up until then it had only been himself. Up to then it had been a private wrestle between him and himself. Nobody else much entered into it. After the people came into it he was,...

Old soldiers never die, they write novels.

And the strange thing was he had never loved her more than in that moment, because at that moment she had become himself.But thats not love, he thought, thats not what she wants, not what...

Every man has a right to kill himself.

Weary looked at him and shook his head and put the tailgate up and drove down the gravel towards the bivouac, carrying two drunks, who both fatuously imagined, that once in a dream somewhere, sometime,...

The boy Prewitt loved the songs because they gave him something, a first hint that pain might not be pointless if you could only turn it into something.

It did not last long. It is only in the movies that knife fighters stab and miss and slash and miss and tussle over several city blocks.

He could not believe that any of them might actually hit somebody. If one did, what a nowhere way to go: killed by accident; slain not as an individual but by sheer statistical probability, by...

He could not blame the Army, Angelo could blame the Army; Angelo hated the Army. But he didnt hate the Army, not even now. He remembered what Maureen had told him once that it was...

I cant take it like this much longer, Milt,” Karen said muffledly into the big CKC shirt with its male smell, allowing herself the luxury of letting the bars all the way down for once,...

I like it too,” Angelo said. “I love this country. Much you and anybody, and you know it.””I know it,” Prew said.”But I still hate this country. You love the Army. But I dont love...

Fife… simply walked off by himself, into the jungle to look at all the things which would continue to exist after he had ceased to. There were a lot of them. Fife looked at them...

It takes courage to stand for what you believe in.

All right, he thought, okay; if thats the way it is; a savagery of anger in him now at the picture. They call them “pin-up girls” and think its cute how “our boys,” now that...

They shouldnt teach their immigrants’ kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it, it ony makes for trouble. Me and the United States is dissociating our alliance...

As they prepared themselves to go ashore no one doubted in theory that at least a certain percentage of them would remain on the island dead, once they set foot on it. But no one...

Of all the things I dislike, I hate women worst.

He knew how to handle pain. You had to lie down with pain, not draw back away from it. You let yourself sort of move around the outside edge of pain like with cold water...

Two whores who finally found something to mother. A guy could write a book about it, he thought bitterly, call it From Hair To Maternity. It would probly be a very long book. Whores did...

The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show...

Did you ever hear the one about how every living woman dies three times? Once when she is seduced of her virginity, once when she is seduced of her freedom (I believe they call it...

One way, he thought, the whole thing of ring fighting was hurting somebody else, deliberately, and particularly when it was not necessary. Two men who have nothing against each other get in a ring and...

…the quickest, efficient, least expensive way to educate a man is to make it painful for him when he is wrong, the same as with any other animal.

I write to reach eternity

…homosexuality is the direct result of chastity in women.

Sitting on the porch alone, listening to them fixing supper, he felt again the indignation he had felt before, the sense of loss and the aloneness, the utter defenselessness that was each man’s lot, sealed...

But he had always believed in fighting for the underdog, against the top dog. He had learned it, not from The Home, or The School, or The Church, but from that fourth and other great...

If I never meet you In this lifeLet me feel the lackA glance from your eyesThen my life Will be yours

Some day…as you grow older, you will find imagination sometimes produces a truth that is greater than any fact.

When compared to the fact that he might very well be dead by this time tomorrow, whether he was courageous or not today was pointless, empty. When compared to the fact that he might be...

Never put things off…you will wake up and find them gone.

You think religions are constant things? inflexible and solid and form full-grown? Religions evolve. They grow out of a need, just like any other natural phenomenon, and they follow the same natural laws. They are...

The main trouble with being an honest man was that it lost you all your illusions.

He had not the makings of that honest man to whom success comes naturally.

All Welsh knew was that he was scared shitless, and at the same time was afflicted with a choking gorge of anger that any social coercion existed in the world which could force him to...