“Silly what's his name, the Shrek, whoever he was on the television this morning?”

“That the last two letters in her name were the first two in his, a silly thing he never mentioned to her but caused him to believe that they were bound together.”

“What a silly god, he makes everybody born bad to go to burning hell. Why so mad? All his fault!”

“I coulda got mad. But then I had to stop and think, well, what did he get in school? What did he get in his work experience? What did he get even from his own union, that gave him some tools to understand what he was seeing on that television?”

“Whoever attacks a custom or a creed, will be confronted with a list of the names of the dead who upheld the custom, or believed the creed. He is asked in a very triumphant and sneering way, if he knows more than all the great and honored of the past. Every defender of a creed has graven upon his memory the names of all "great" men whose actions or words can be tortured into evidence for his doctrine.”

“"The cap'n is Wolf Larsen, or so men call him. I never heard his other name. But you better speak soft with him. He is mad this morning. The mate-" But he did not finish. The cook had glided in.”

“We are—proudly—a people with no sense of class or caste. We judge no man by his name or inheritance, but by what he does—and for what he stands.”

“Well, I can’t waste a morning arguing with ten-year olds. Needless to say, I was ten myself once and just as silly.”

“We all believe silly things. What matters is how silly and how many.”

“Nobody seriously thinks of television as a viewer's mode of perception…No matter how much he wants people to look at his product, the advertiser doesn't realize that television is [the viewer's] way of looking at him, & not his way of reaching them.”