“Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.”

She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.

The nicest veterans, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.

The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.

Maturity, is knowing what your limitations are, Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.

Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

There are too many of us and we are all too far apart.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We are fighting today for costly grace.

The worst thing to do is to die while reading LIFE magazine.

Give me liberty or give me death.

I don’t want the corpses of flowers about me.

The least I can do is speak out for the hundreds of chimpanzees who, right now, sit hunched, miserable and without hope, staring out with dead eyes from their metal prisons. They cannot speak for themselves.

The meaning of life is that it stops.

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!