Quotes from book

Hocus Pocus

“They're playin our song Gene!”

“[Freedom of speech] isn't something somebody else gives you. That's something you give to yourself.”

“I asked Rob Roy where he had gone to college.
"Yale," he said.
I told him what Helen Dole said about Yale, that it ought to be called "Plantation Owners' Tech."
"I don't get it," he said.
"I had to ask her to explain it myself," I said. "She said Yale was where plantation owners learned how to get the natives to kill each other instead of them."”

“During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.”

“She was an alcoholic. I didn't blame myself for that. The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol.”

“Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.”

“If facts weren't funny, or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.”

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

“The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.”

“The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, "There's a Chaplain who never visited the front."”

“Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.”

“profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.”

“Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer people to find, was this:WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT
BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAPOnly he didn't say 'doggone.'"”

“When the excrement hit the air conditioner”

“I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much.”

“See the nigger fly the airplane!”

“I wish I had been born a bird instead," he said.
"I wish we had all been born birds instead.”