Joseph Heller Quotes

You’re inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age?

You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You’re dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!

While none of the work we do is very important, it is important that we do a great deal of it.

What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually un-natural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can’t all be worth dying for.

They think that they’re smart and that the rest of us are dumb.

There was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to.

The enemy is any-body who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.

That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance.

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.

People have a right to do anything that’s not forbidden by law, and there’s no law against lying to you.

Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?

Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning.