Joseph Heller Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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We should cease thinking about men as the enemy of children and women.
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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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I'm a member of the 1960s generation. We didn't have any wisdom.
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One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.
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The death of chief justice Rehnquist and the president's nomination of John Roberts raises the stakes for the court and the American people exponentially.
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Every day, my love for Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, increases.
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He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, and derived genuine pleasure from contemplating a painting, a statuette, a rare lace curtain - no matter what - after he had bought it and placed it among his household gods.
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Follow your instincts. That's where true wisdom manifests itself.
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As a young physician in the mid-'80s, caring for people who had contracted H.I.V., I lost two of my patients to suicide at a time when the virus was doing very little harm to them. I have always thought of them as having been killed by a metaphor, by the burden of secrecy and shame associated with the disease.
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In an artwork you're always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death.
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Peace enforcement is a much more difficult kind of operation than peacekeeping.
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Biography lends to death a new terror.
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Much of what has gone wrong in the pursuit of Arab-Israeli peace is due to a lack of strong leadership, primarily among the Palestinians.
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President Sadat of Egypt made a historic breakthrough in 1977 when he put an end to war and convinced both Egyptians and Israelis that he was ready to make peace. He broke down the walls of suspicion and prejudice.
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Giving opens the way for receiving.
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People think that by living on some mountainside in a tent and being frozen to death by freezing rain, they're somehow discovering reality, but of course that's just another fiction dreamed up by a TV producer.
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And lastly there is the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death. Fairy-stories provide many examples and modes of this … Fairy-stories are made by men not by fairies. The Human-stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness.
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In every unbeliever's heart there is an uneasy feeling that, after all, he may awake after death and find himself immortal. This is his punishment for his unbelief. This is the agnostic's Hell.
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Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do
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Here is an eternal truth. Life cannot be divided into compartments in some which God is involved and in others of which he is not involved... The fact is that God does not need to be invited into certain departments of life, and kept out of others. He is everywhere, all through life and in every activity of life. He hears not only the words that are spoken in his name; he hears all words; and there cannot be any such thing as a form of words which evades bringing God into any transaction. We will regard all promises as sacred if we remember that all promises are made in the presence of God.
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With thoughts of the past and concerns about the future, we rob ourselves of a full experience of the present.
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I've never associated myself with other singers, certainly not female singers.
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The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.