"People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say."

"The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth."

"People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God."

"We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap."

"If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy."

"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."

"I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours."

"To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon."

"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before."

"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center."

"Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John."

"Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward."

"If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."

"I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival."

"About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm."

"The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest."

"Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything."

"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."

"Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?"

"Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone."

"All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true."

"Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia."