Joseph Heller Quotes

It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.

When I grow up I want to be a little boy.

The question is: what is a sane man to do in an insane society?

Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it.

You know, that might be the answer - to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail.

[They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.

He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

For war there is always enough. It's peace that's expensive.

There was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to.

The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.

Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy. Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts - and the question is: What does a sane man do in an insane society?

In the long run, failure was the only thing that worked predictably. All else was accidental.

The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.

Rise above principal and do what's right.

History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind. Surely, Watt with his steam engine, Faraday with his electric motor, and Edison with his incandescent light bulb did not have it as their goal to contribute to a fuel shortage some day that would place their countries at the mercy of Arab oil.

Insanity is contagious.

Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity, and some people have mediocrity thrust upon them.

The body stores the trauma of our lives in muscular rigidity, thereby keeping us stuck in the past. When we release the tension in the body and align ourselves with gravity, we take a new stand in life. This allows us to be at ease with ourselves and in harmony in our relationship to others and to our planet.

mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.

The laws of nature are only as immutable as the minds which promote them. Ignorance of the law is 9/10ths of the law. Just because you aren't paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.

It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

From men motivated by moral certitude, history teaches, no lasting good ever comes.

So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it then seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven?