“Like so many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts–census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.”

Information. What’s wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?

To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.

Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.

All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.

Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.

For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross.

What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove’s difference and the universe can be on into a whole ‘nother song.

If the world offered nothing, nowhere to support or make bearable whatever her private grief was, then it is that world, and not she, that is at fault.

Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.

Length is usually intensity. Not time.

It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.

She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as ‘pretty’ but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him.

If patterns of ones and zeros were ‘like’ patterns of human lives and death, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?

Perhaps its familiarity rendered it temporarily invisible to you.

A screaming comes across the sky.

What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?

Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.

Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.

The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.

Those who prize freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it for long.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.