A Man Without a Country

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

It is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln. He always steals the show.

A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.

If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favorite joke.

We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

Socialism is no more an evil word than Christianity. Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.

Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes.

If you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington DC.

We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding.

While we were being bombed in Dresden, sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one slider said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, "I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight." Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it.

I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment."

The highest treason in the USA is to say Americans are not loved, no matter where they are, no matter what they are doing there.

[America's soldiers] are being treated … like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

We've sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I wish we hadn't. I hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer show.

Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals.

Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be.

You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff. You're not expecting it.

Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn't the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

Old Norwegian Proverb: Swedes have short dicks but long memories.

Humor is an almost physiological response to fear.

During the Vietnam War, Abbie Hoffman announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if this was true or not.

Don't spoil the party, but here's the truth: We have squandered our planet's resources, including air and water, as though there were no tomorrow, so now there isn't going to be one.

So there goes the Junior Prom, but that's not the half of it.

I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

If God were alive today, he would have to be an atheist, because the excrement has hit the air-conditioning big time, big time.

[Vietnam] only made billionaires out of millionaires. [Iraq] is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.

George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography.

The crucified planet Earth,

should it find a voice

and a sense of irony,

might now well say

of our abuse of it,

"Forgive them, Father,

They know not what they do."The irony would be

that we know what

we are doing.When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps

from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

"It is done."

People did not like it here.

What is it, what can it possibly be about blowjobs and golf?

Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?

My father said "When in doubt, castle."

And now I want to tell you about my late Uncle Alex. He was my father's kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, If this isn't nice, I don't know what is. So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

Is it possible that seemingly incredible geniuses like Bach and Shakespeare and Einstein were not in fact superhuman, but simply plagiarists, copying great stuff from the future?

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.