“Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.”

Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.

Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.

I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.

The simplest questions are the most difficult.

I think anybody incapable of changing his mind is crazy.

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.

I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

I’m creating an imaginary — it’s always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.

What a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. Hopeless rubbish.

As soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.

Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on.

There are no innocent bystanders, What are they doing there in the first place?

If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you’ve lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future.

When Nature her great masterpiece designed,And framed her last, best work, the human mind,Her eye intent on all the wondrous plan,She formed of various stuff the various Man.

The gentle mind by gentle deeds is known, For a man by nothing is so well betrayed As by his manners.

Female beauties are as fickle in their faces as in their minds; though casualties should spare them, age brings in a necessity of decay.

This iron world bungs down the stoutest hearts to lowest state; for misery doth bravest minds abate.

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.

I knew I held strength when in the darkest, coldest corner of my mind I managed to make flowers grow.

Do things as soon as you can. If a decision needs to be made, make it. It gives you more time to change your mind.