Quote collection
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"It seems to me that the most universal revolutionary wish now or ever is a wish for heaven, a wish by a human being to be honored by angels for something other than beauty or usefulness."
"Much of the conversation in the country consisted of lines from television shows, both past and present."
"I would not be interested in writing if I didn't feel that what I wrote was an act of good citizenship or an attempt, at any rate, to be a good citizen."
"Jokes have to be quite naked to be understood. They have to be quite simple."
"Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so."
"Unhappy failures need not apply."
"My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward."
"You are reading a bold and universal headline which says ,’I am here, I am here, I am here."
"How embarrassing to be human."
"Anyway -- because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next -- and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis -- at any time of night or day."
"We're a terribly lonesome society. For all I know, all societies are. You can make a few new friends, that's all. You can't change history. History is happening to us now."
"All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again."
"We were all gun nuts and they were called varmints, crows were, because they ate grain and so did we."
"In 1844, Karl Marx said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." He said this at a time when opium and opium derivatives were the only painkillers. And he said it helped a little. He might as well have said, "Religion is the aspirin of the people.""
"In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine."
"It strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that man can always solve his problems ... This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry-or laugh."
"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 go to Harvard and be misinformed."
"What memories for mud to have."
"People would be surprised if they knew how much in this world was due to prayers."
"History! Read it and weep!"