Quote collection
653 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Mayonnaise, like hollandaise, was invented by the French to cover up the flavor of spoiled flesh, stale vegetables, rotten fish. Beware the sauce! Where food comes beslobbered with an elegant slime you may well suspect the integrity of the basic ingredients."
"The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn."
"The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an "equalizer.""
"Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff."
"Beware of your wishes: They will probably come true."
"Government should be weak, amateurish and ridiculous. At present, it fulfills only a third of the role."
"Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers."
"All men are brothers, we like to say, half-wishing sometimes in secret it were not true. But perhaps it is true. And is the evolutionary line from protozoan to Spinoza any less certain? That also may be true. We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred."
"What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse."
"All living things on earth are kindred."
"When I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my checkbook."
"I am my brother's keeper, says the chickenshit liberal. Perhaps he does not realize that he now has more than 2 1/2 billion brothers."
"Don't talk to me about other worlds, separate realities, lost continents or invisible realms -- I know where I belong. Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now."
"Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our antimaterialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime."
"I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words 'phenomenology' or 'structuralism', I reach for my buck knife."
"Life without music would be an intolerable insult."
"Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube; there are some things one would rather have done than do."
"The world is what it is, no less and no more, and therein lies its entire and sufficient meaning."
"I'm a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts."
"Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you've nothing better to do."