“There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.”

“Maybe she thought the garbage and rocks in your head were interesting. But finally, garbage is garbage and rocks are rocks.”

“Rights come from human experience, particularly experiences with injustice… In a word, rights come from wrongs.”

“For them, it was nothing but an ordinary day on an ordinary day on an ordinary weekend, but for her, there was something revelatory about the notion that wonderful moments like these existed.”

“How to explain to the earth that it was more functional as a vegetable patch than a flower garden, just as factories were more functional than schools and boys were more functional as weapons than as humans.”

“Asylums are nothing more than gardens of human cabbages, of miserable, grotesque, repugnant human beings watered with the fertilizer of injections.”

“You were born as an ordinary human, but make sure you die as an extraordinary human”

“According to a variety of very authoritative sources, Henry A. Kissinger is not a Jew, but a faggot. I will not tolerate any denial of civil rights to a person who happens to be homosexual. Ordinarily, a homosexual is like an ordinary person suffering the affliction of nasty boils; one recognizes the distinction between the person and the affliction.… Henry A. Kissinger is no ordinary, common, garden-variety of homosexual. His heathen sexual inclinations are merely an integral part of a larger evil.… Think of Nero, and then of Kissinger, and then of Nero, and then of Roy M. Cohn. That is the kind of faggot Henry Kissinger is.”

“Great books are great teachers; they are showing us every day what ordinary people are capable of. These books come out of ignorant, inquiring humanity. They are usually the first announcements for success in learning. Most of them were written for, and addressed to, ordinary people.”

“I was wrong. I admit it. I believed that there were things which still mattered just because they had mattered once. But I was wrong. Nothing matters but breath, breathing, to know and to be alive.”