How different the new order would be if we could consult the veteran instead of the politician.

We kill because we re afraid of our own shadow, afraid that if we used a little common sense we'd have to admit that our glorious principles were wrong.

The world goes on because a few men in every generation believe in it utterly, accept it unquestioningly; they underwrite it with their lives.

No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen.

I am positively against all this crap which is carried on first in the name of this thing, then in the name of that. I believe only in what is active, immediate, and personal.

Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet ... There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet - if one wants to extract the full flavour of their content.

Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, pessaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.