“I would turn out rough idea after rough idea, and he would veto eighty percent of them. I pretty much prostituted myself for six months but I couldn’t please him, so he sent me packing.”

Calvin: The more you know, the harder it is to take decisive action. Once you are informed, you start seeing complexities and shades of gray.

You’ve taught me nothing except how to cynically manipulate the system. Congratulations.

Raised to an alarming extent by Madison Avenue and Hollywood, poised with my cynical and alienated peers to take over the world when you’re old and weak… Am I scary, or what?

From now on, I’ll connect the dots my own way.

Things are never quite as scary when you’ve got a best friend.

God put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I am so far behind that I will never die.

Tomorrow we’ll not only seize the day, we’ll throttle it.

Isn’t it sad how some people’s grip on their lives is so precarious that they’ll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

Childhood is for spoiling adulthood.

Hobbes: Jump! Jump! Jump! I win! Calvin: You win? Aaugghh! You won last time! I hate it when you win! Aarrggh! Mff! Gnnk! I hate this game! I hate the whole world! Aghhh!

Every time I’ve built character, I’ve regretted it.

If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I’ll bet they’d live a lot differently.

In the short term, it would make me happy to go play outside. In the long term, it would make me happier to do well at school and become successful. But in the VERY long term, I know which will make better memories.

You know, there are times when it’s a source of personal pride to not be human.

County library? Reference desk, please. Hello? Yes, I need a word definition. Well, that’s the problem.

You realize nothing is as clear as it first appears. Ultimately, knowledge is paralyzing. Being a man of action, I cannot afford to take that risk. Hobbes: You’re ignorant, but at least you act on it.

The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.

Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.

It is the rare fortune of these days that one may think what one likes and say what one thinks.

Never use the word ‘audience.’ The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don’t have an ‘audience’. They’re talking to a single person all the time.

Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.

Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they’re here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.

I’m not going to sit here now and say ‘do this,’ or ‘do that.’ But you must – must – expunge any vestige of racism.

People flatter us because they can depend upon our credulity.