“Wouldn’t it be great if we all grew up to be what we wanted to be? The world would be full of nurses, firemen, and ballerinas.”

I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain.

Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.

I always wondered why somebody doesn’t do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody.

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.

Growing up in Michigan was fine, until I realized where I was.

I still believe that sex is dirty. It’s just that now I wouldn’t have it any other way.

We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation.

Language was invented because of the deep human need to complain.

Why is it that when we talk to God we’re said to be praying but when God talks to us we’re schizophrenic?

If you have a dog or a cat, you know how developed they can be. How sensitive, how aware. They suffer. We all do.

We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.

When I’ve had a meltdown, people will say to me, “Well, you failed to keep your sense of humor.”

You can’t expect insights, even the big ones, to make you suddenly understand everything. But I figure: Hey it’s a step in the right direction if they leave you confused in a deeper way.

The start to a better world is the belief that it is possible.

I try to be cynical, but it’s so hard to keep up.

9 to 5 made people aware of equal pay for equal work. It hasn’t really happened, but it has come closer.

We must become bigger than we have been: more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community.

Great hearts can only be made by great troubles. Great faith must have great trials.

Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries. Yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.

I’m very scared to do it. What if I don’t come back? With the whole light-years thing, what if I come back 10,000 years later, and everyone I know is dead? I’ll be like, ‘Great. Now I have to start all over’.

Sometimes I have to remind myself, that on my worst day I live like somebody on their greatest.

Poetry is interesting because not everyone is going to become a great poet, but anyone can be, and anyone can enjoy poetry, and it’s this openness, this accessibility of poetry that makes it the language of people.

Democracy is a constant tension between truth and half-truth and, in the arsenal of truth, there is no greater weapon than fact.

Those who boast are seldom the great.