Quote collection
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"American Rifleman and Field & Stream had ads for "varmint guns." Another varmint was a ground hog because a horse would be going along and he'd stick his foot in a ground hog hole and break his leg. So we were trying to prevent that, too. But we finally scared ourselves. We didn't realize we were nuts."
"The most racist, nastiest act by the USA, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki. Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away men, women, and children."
"Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are."
"How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?....The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore."
"That was what made them so hilarious and unafraid. That was the strength of the Nazis. [...] They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make Him stay away."
"Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop? Answer: That is bird poop, too."
"What is my definition of jazz? "Safe sex of the highest order.""
"If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable."
"The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world's total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000. I suppose they will all want dignity, I said."
"So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."
"They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun... They were dressed half for battle, half for tennis or croquet."
"In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in his cosmic loneliness. And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat, looked around, and spoke. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely. "Everything must have a purpose?" asked God. "Certainly," said man. "Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God. And He went away."
"So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States.... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal."
"Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side."
"The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow."
"If facts weren't funny, or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them."
"Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time."
"Well, it's an ancestral tribe. These were immigrants from north of Germany who came here about the time of the Civil War, but anyway, these people called themselves free thinkers. They were impressed, incidentally, by Darwin. They're called Humanists now; people who aren't so sure that the Bible is the Word of God."
"I've often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they're on, why they don't fall off it, how much time they've probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on."
"Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself -- will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows -- some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history -- But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, 'This fact I can do without."