Quotes to inspire and reflect

If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would be pretty much left with “Let’s Make a Deal.”

Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.

Your responsibility as a parent is not as great as you might imagine. You need not supply the world with the next conqueror of disease or a major movie star. If your child simply grows up to be someone who does not use the word “collectible” as a noun, you can consider yourself an unqualified success.

Sleep is death without the responsibility.

The Owl looked up to the Stars above

And the sun sank again on the grand Australian bush—the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird, and of much that is different from things in other lands.

[ Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge :] An Archangel a little damaged.

O Time! arrest your flight, and you, propitious hours, stay your course.

Only one being is wanting, and your whole world is bereft of people.

In a few minutes he will go downstairs, join the party, his family. But for now his mother is distracted, laughing at a story a friend is telling her, unaware of her son’s absence. For now, he starts to read.

I bend but do not break.

If you have learned anything at all from us [wild geese], Tummetott, you no longer think that the humans should have the whole earth to themselves.

You were singing? I’m very glad, very well, start dancing now.

The common people have scarcely any culture, the great have no soul. . . . Were I to choose between the two, I should select, without hesitation, being a plebeian.

Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

Up out of the lampshade, startled by the overhead light, flew a large nocturnal butterfly that began circling the room. The strains of the piano and violin rose up weakly from below.

Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

There is no more unfortunate creature under the sun than a fetishist who yearns for a woman’s shoe and has to settle for the whole woman.

Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.

Intercourse with a woman is sometimes a satisfactory substitute for masturbation. But it takes a lot of imagination to make it work.

In the yard across the street we saw a snowman holding a garbage can lid smashed into a likeness of the mad English king, George the Third.

I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.

We’ve had some very caustic writings

[ Remark after the invasion of Cambodia, 1970 :] We are all the President’s men.

[Richard Nixon] would have been a great, great man had somebody loved him.

Every nation, like every individual, walks in a vain show—else it could not live with itself—but I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed that they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to brutal mankind.

A conventional army loses if it does not win.

It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,

we have not the time to meet you.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

The Cat That Walked by Himself.

When you get to a man in the case,

The Law of the Jungle.

Though I’ve belted you and flayed you,

An’ for all ’is dirty ’ide

We’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way,

We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart;

Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep

There will never be any more great men in India. They will all, when they are boys, go whoring after strange gods.

Lalun is a member of the most ancient profession in the world.

[ Suggesting his own eulogy :] Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir . . . America has defaulted on this promissory note in so far as her citizens of color are concerned.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, and when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of that old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

I have a dream this afternoon that my four little children, that my four little children will not come up in the same young days that I came up within, but they will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, and not the color of their skin.

We can never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.”

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly , . . . and with a willingness to accept the penalty.

I have a dream tonight. One day my little daughter and my two sons will grow up in a world not conscious of the color of their skin but only conscious of the fact that they are members of the human race.