God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

The letter said that they were two feet high, and green., and shaped like plumber’s friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely flexible, usually pointed to the sky....

Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.

I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the...

Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.

We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.

I will say further, as an officer of an enormous international conglomerate, that nobody who is doing well in this economy ever even wonders waht is really going on.We are chimpanzees. We are orangutans.

A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would be two such bands of light. Our awareness...

What gets me most about these people, Daddy, isn’t how ignorant they are, or how much they drink. It’s the way they have of thinking that everything nice in the world is a gift to...

And I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted...

I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager...

Pretend to be good always and even God will be fooled.

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most...

The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.

I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind.

I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been...

When I got home from my war, my uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he bellowed, ‘You’re a MAN now!’I damn near killed my first German.

We’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re ten…. Most kids can’t afford to...

I can think of another quickie education for a child, which, in its way, is almost as salutary: Meeting a human being who is tremendously respected by the adult world, and realizing that that person...

Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you now because I never stopped dawdling like an eight-year-old on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and...

I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing...

…we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this...

Bertrand Russell declared that, in case he met God, he would say to Him, “Sir, you did not give us enough information.” I would add to that, “All the same, Sir, I’m not persuaded that...

He had a W.C. Fields twang and a nose like a prize strawberry.

Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are.

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;Man got to tell himself he understand.

She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show...

There is no peace, I’m sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.

And I like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost...

Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir.” he read, “You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only...

The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would...

The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.The rarest of these specialists, he says,...

It is, in the imagination of combat’s fans, the divinely listless loveplay that follows the orgasm of victory. It is called ‘mopping up.

And Castle nodded sagely. ‘So this is a picture of the meaninglessness of it all! I couldn’t agree more.”Do you really agree?’ I asked. ‘A minute ago you said something about Jesus.”Who?’ said Castle.’Jesus Christ?”Oh,’...

Flashlight beams danced crazily

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

I’d rather have written ‘Cheers’ than anything I’ve written.

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor,...

He was talking about the sign that said ‘THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.”All knew was that I didn’t want my daughter or anybody’s child to see a message that negative every time she comes into...

My advice to writers just starting out? Don’t use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.

Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don’t read much or think much — who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could.

I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.

That’s the point. Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. So people getting married think they’re wonderful, and that they’re going to have a baby– that’s wonderful, when actually they’re...

A society, on occasion, can be the worst possible describer of mental health.