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“While there is a lower class I am in it. While there is a criminal element I am of it. While there is a soul in prison I am not free.”
Why argue somebody else out of the expectation of some sort of an Afterlife?
The 2 prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.
It’s misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm. It is unfair to youngsters particularly to leave them wholly unprepared for monster screw-ups and starring roles in Keystone Kop comedies and much, much worse.
human beings were, in his own words, “about 1,000 times dumber and meaner than they think they are.”
Just because we think we’re so wonderful doesn’t mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.”
“My work is done.”
I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.
One would have to say that that was extra-heavy history.
The prison to him would have been a scheme for depriving the lower social orders of leadership in the Class Struggle and for providing them with a horrible alternative to accepting whatever their greedy paymasters would give them in the way of working conditions and subsistence.
They could feast their eyes on whatever they liked, just so long as it wasn’t relevant.
The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren’t funny or scary, or couldn’t make you rich, the heck with them.
I didn’t think Mildred’s craziness was as unbearable as they did. In the Army I had grown used to people who talked nonsense all day long. Vietnam was 1 big hallucination. After adjusting to that, I could adjust to anything.
People who are wary of what they might find in a book if they opened 1 are right to be. I have just had my mind blown by an essay on the embryology of the human eye.
the trouble with the Ruling Class was that too many of its members were nitwits
When you dare to think about how huge the illegal drug business is in this country, you have to suspect that practically everybody has a steady buzz on,
I myself have been addicted to older women and housekeeping, which my court-appointed lawyer tells me might be germs we could make grow into a credible plea of insanity.
“Counselor, in these fast-moving times, with progress gone hog-wild, grandfathers are bound to be wrong about everything.”
I’d thought, that the two principal currencies of the planet were the Yen and fellatio.
The truth can be very funny in an awful way, especially as it relates to greed and hypocrisy.
The only sort of woman who excites me is an older one in uncomfortable circumstances, full of doubts not only about herself but about the value of life itself.
My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.
“The complicated futility of ignorance.”
the Nazi swastika was intended to be a version of a Christian cross, a cross made out of axes. Stern said that Christians had gone to a lot of trouble denying that the swastika was just another cross, saying it was a primitive symbol from the primordial ooze of the pagan past.
most of the convicts had been in the drug business, and were either Third World people or dealt with Third World people. So the Metric System was old stuff to them.
“People are never stronger,” I said, “than when they have thought up their own arguments for believing what they believe.
“Unfortunately for all of us,” he said, “the moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on.”
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
I think any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever the people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.
I was fed up with the human race. I wanted nothing more than to be left strictly alone with my thoughts.
Three-quarters of them couldn’t put the cap back on a bottle of whiskey without crossing the threads.
“Preacher,” he said, referring to his skin, “I was born in a uniform.”
Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.
“All they asked of me,” she said, “was that I not be a human being.”
In that case, he said, he would leave the cross unkissed. He said he didn’t want to go to yet another place where people were so cruel.
Why they ever wanted to own a country in such an advanced state of physical and spiritual and intellectual dilapidation is a mystery.
Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.
