“Language is a virus from outer space.”
“A functioning police state needs no police.”
“Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?”
“The face of evil is always the face of total need.”
“In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.”
“Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.”
“I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous.”
“There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.”
“Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.”
“After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say ''I WANT TO SEE THE MANAGER.''”
“Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.”
“Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.”
“Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.”
“America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.”
“Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.”
“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.”
“There is the pleasurable orgasm, like a rising sales graph, and there is the unpleasurable orgasm, slumping ominously like the Dow Jones in 1929.”
“Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.”
“No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he's got the fridge full of sausages and spring water.”
“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.”
“So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”
“This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.”
“Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.”
“I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.”
“Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? ''And here is my good big centipede!'' If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.”
“After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.”
“Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it ''creative observation.'' Creative viewing.”
“America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.”
“Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo -- and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.”
“The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.”