Quotes from book

A Man Without a Country

“During the Vietnam War, Abbie Hoffman announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if this was true or not.”

“Old Norwegian Proverb: Swedes have short dicks but long memories.”

“My father said "When in doubt, castle."”

“[Vietnam] only made billionaires out of millionaires. [Iraq] is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.”

“The highest treason in the USA is to say Americans are not loved, no matter where they are, no matter what they are doing there.”

“Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals.”

“Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn't the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.”

“It is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln. He always steals the show.”

“If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now."”

“What is it, what can it possibly be about blowjobs and golf?”

“You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff. You're not expecting it.”

“I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.”

“Requiem:The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do."The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.”

“While we were being bombed in Dresden, sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one slider said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, “I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.””

“Is it possible that seemingly incredible geniuses like Bach and Shakespeare and Einstein were not in fact superhuman, but simply plagiarists, copying great stuff from the future?”

“Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes.”

“And now I want to tell you about my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is. So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

“If God were alive today, he would have to be an atheist, because the excrement has hit the air-conditioning big time, big time.”

“We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.”