Hocus Pocus

How embarrassing to be human.

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.

"I wish I had been born a bird instead," he said.

"I wish we had all been born birds instead."

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

When the excrement hit the air conditioner

Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer people to find, was this:WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT

BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAPOnly he didn't say 'doggone.'"

If facts weren't funny, or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.

During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.

I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.

The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, "There's a Chaplain who never visited the front."

[Freedom of speech] isn't something somebody else gives you. That's something you give to yourself.

I asked Rob Roy where he had gone to college.

"Yale," he said.

I told him what Helen Dole said about Yale, that it ought to be called "Plantation Owners' Tech."

"I don't get it," he said.

"I had to ask her to explain it myself," I said. "She said Yale was where plantation owners learned how to get the natives to kill each other instead of them."

She was an alcoholic. I didn't blame myself for that. The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol.

Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

See the nigger fly the airplane!

profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

They're playin our song Gene!

The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.