“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.”

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.

Time is never wasted if you remember to bring along something to read.

Why should things be easy to understand?

What, I should only trust good people? Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense.

Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.

Our history is an aggregate of last moments.

You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

All variables are independent.

A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.

All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.

The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.

Ills are many, blessings few, but dreams tonight will shelter you.

If there is something comforting – religious, if you want – about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

Teamwork,” Koteks snarled, “is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It’s a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.

It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.

There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.

No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.

In God, there is no sorrow or suffering or affliction. If you want to be free of all affliction and suffering, hold fast to God, and turn wholly to Him, and to no one else. Indeed, all your suffering comes from this: that you do not turn toward God and no one else.

It is clear that not in one thing alone, but in many ways equality and freedom of speech are a good thing.

Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.

Michael Moore and I actually have a lot in common. We both appreciate living in a country where there’s free expression. But Michael, if you ever show up at my front door with a camera, I’ll kill you. I mean it.

Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity.

A nation’ s strength ultimately consists in what it can do on its own, and not in what it can borrow from others.

We cannot permit any inquisition either within or without the law or apply any religious test to the holding of office. The mind of America must be forever free.