Hocus Pocus

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

Just because you can read, write and do a little math, doesn't mean that you're entitled to conquer the universe.

If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness.

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 the library,' he said. 'And then I found out it was you who was responsible for it.' 'What's so negative about it?' I said. 'What could be a more negative word than "futility"?' he said. '"Ignorance,"' I said.

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 as ugly as rhinoceroses. Just because we think we're so wonderful doesn't mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.

profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

Being an American means never having to say you're sorry.

My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.

Any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.

bergeron's epitaph for the planet, i remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the grand canyon for the flying-saucer people to find was this: WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT, BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP. only he didn't say "doggone.

Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are 2 things people at the top can't stand, they have to be leakage and overflow.

It appeared to the Elders that the people here would believe anything about themselves, no matter how preposterous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings' heads that the whole Universe had been created by one big animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot of less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives of the Creator. The people down here just ate that up!

I had to laugh like hell

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 that is going to happen to them.

I think Willim Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank though, that's not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.

there i was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic tv, with virtually no health services for the poor. where to go? what to do?

...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 whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE

Despite our enormous brains and jam-packed libraries, we germ hotels cannot expect to understand absolutely everything.

So what indeed! The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren't funny or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.

The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It's misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm

The 2 prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.

I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.

At least the World will end, an event anticipated with great joy by many. It will end very soon, but not in the year 2000, which has come and gone. From that I conclude that God Almighty is not heavily into Numerology.

people who insisted that it was their Constitutional right to keep military weapons in their homes all looked forward to the day when they could shoot Americans who didn’t have what they had, who didn’t look like their friends and relatives, in a sort of open-air shooting gallery we used to call in Vietnam a “Free Fire Zone.

he predicted...that human slavery would come bac, that it had infact never gone away. he said that so many people wanted to come here because it was so easy to rob the poor people, who got absolutely no protection from the government. he talked about bridges falling down and water mains breaking because of no maintenance. he talked about oil spills and radioactive waste and poisoned aquifers and looted banks and liquidated corporations. "and nobody ever gets punished for anything," he said. "being an american means never having to say you're sorry.

Every so often, in the midst of chaos, you come across an amazing, inexplicable instance of civic responsibility. Maybe the last shred of faith people have is in their firemen.

...all subjects do not reside in neat little compartments, but are continuous and inseparable from the one big subject we have been put on Earth to study, which is life itself.

They had managed to convert their wealth, which had originally been in the form of factories or stores or other demanding enterprises, into a form so liquid and abstract, negotiable representations of money on paper, that there were few reminders coming from anywhere that they might be responsible for anyone outside their own circle of friends and relatives.

To me, wanting every habitable planet to be inhabited is like wanting everybody to have athlete's foot.

I asked the Warden why he never left this valley, why he didn’t get away from the prison and me and the ignorant young guards and the bells across the lake and all the rest of it. He had years of leave time he had never used. He said, “I would only meet more people.” “You don’t like any kind of people?” I said. We were talking in a sort of joshing mode, so I could ask him that. “I wish I had been born a bird instead,” he said. “I wish we had all been born birds instead.