World War Two had certainly made everyone very tough.

You talk about the Catholics and the Negroes- said the G-man, and yet, here your two best friends are a Catholic and a Negro. What's so mysterious about that? said Jones. Don't you hate them? said the...

Years and years. Why did it have to happen? It was one more hollow echo to the question humanity had been asking for millenniums, the question men were seemingly born to ask

It was a perfectly good word – until Eliot got hold of it. It's spoiled for me now. Eliot did to the word love what the Russians did to the word democracy. If Eliot is going to love everybody, no...

Other people say, Hello or Goodbye! We always say, Excuse me, no matter what we're doing.' He threw up his hands. 'No more apologies! So we're poor! All right, we're poor! This is America! And America...

We humanists try to behave as decently, as fairly, and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife.

There is a fine article in the current Reader's Digest with the title, There are No Atheists in Foxholes.

Lucky me , Lucky mud

Most of the company's employees were content to do what they were told and incurious as to how it was, exactly, that they had worked the miracles that somehow arrived all packaged and labeled and...

It might make me seem more human at this point, which is to say more sympathetic, if I were to declare that I itched and blinked and nearly swooned with a feeling of unreality. Sorry. Not so. I...

Also, and again I intend no offense, the most meaningful and often harrowing adventures which I and many like me have experienced have had to do with the rearing of children. "Howl" does not deal with...

Truly great poems never do, somehow.

I then believed that a rich man should have some understanding of the place from which his riches came. That was very juvenile of me. Great wealth should be accepted unquestioningly, or not at all.

Real people don't make their livings that way any more. Those three romantics out there make as much sense as Marie Antoinette and her milkmaids. When the bankruptcy proceedings begin – in a week, a...

I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and...

On an average day, 324,000 new babies are born into the world every day. During that same day, 10,000 persons, on an average, will have starved to death or died from malnutrition.' So it goes. 'In...

the human condition can be summed up in just one word, and this is the word: Embarrassment.

No art is possible without a dance with death, he wrote. The

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought...

It had to be done, Rumfoord told Billy, speaking of the destruction of Dresden. I know, said Billy. That's war. I know. I'm not complaining. It must have been hell on the ground. It was, said Billy...

But, he said, but how the hell innocent is a man who helps make a thing like an atomic bomb? And how can you say a man had a good mind when he couldn't even bother to do anything when the...

I thought that was pretty good. So then I disturbed my father at his typewriter, and asked him what my heritage was from his side of the family. I didn't know then what sperm was, and so wouldn't...

Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor....

Labor history was pornography of a sort in those days, and even more so in these days. In public schools and in the homes of nice people it was and remains pretty much taboo to tell tales of labor's...

He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between.He says.Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips...

The meeting with Hapgood came about because I had told Uncle Alex that I might try to get a job with a labor union after the Army let me go. Unions were admirable instruments for extorting something...

The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world. Let us start our Republic with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas chambers, and a national game. After that, we can...

Billy now leaned over that parapat, looked down at all the people moving hither and yon. They were jerky little scissors. They were a lot of fun.

I wonder about turtles.

Rented a tent, a tent, a tent; Rented a tent, a tent, a tent. Rented a tent! Rented a tent! Rented a, rented a tent.