“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.”

A consumer society is about simplfying and degrading the consumer as well as the product.

I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go.

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.

If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.

The nonconformist here may be “beat down” by life but still has a beauty in his or her longing for freedom and for an awakening of the mind.

The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible

The face of evil is always the face of total need.

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.

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.

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.

Only I can’t do them so I ended up on my ass followed by the most unsightly backward roll out of it, followed by the cast falling over in laughter and a good portion of the audience too.

For some reason it made me want to curl up in the fetal position. I could have slept right there on their kitchen table.

Kaczynski appointed a judge to the position of deputy justice minister who had once sentenced current President Bronislaw Komorowski to a prison term.

I think, as poets, we are in the odd position of constantly defending our art form. Which is funny and also sort of invigorating, too. No one really says, “Oh you’re a lawyer? I’ve never understood the law. In fact,

I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.

Our position was: If you don’t attack us, there won’t be any violence; if you bring violence to us, we will defend ourselves.

Only those who regard healing as the ultimate goal of their efforts can, therefore, be designated as physicians.