B.S. Johnson Quotes

Like the one-tenth of our brain that we currently use, I think now that most if not all of us have access to about one-tenth of our possible feelings.

It's funny how heterosexuals have lives and the rest of us have "lifestyles."

Somehow I evolved into a person who ceased to ask permission.

I came from the most orthodox background you could ask for.

I'm one of the few people in this world who can do anything I choose. I can't tell you how good I'm feeling.

What we resist persists.

How desperately we wish to maintain our trust in those we love! In the face of everything, we try to find reasons to trust. Because losing faith is worse than falling out of love.

A friend said to me, 'Be glad for your troubles - they strengthen you.' Well, if that's the truth, I'm going to be so strong they'll have to beat me to death!

The guiding principle of my life, 'the means are the ends,' has taught me that our participation in a corrupt system facilitates it and corrupts and therefore defeats us.

Some people always assume that if you mention a problem, you caused it.

I have more fun, and enjoy more finan­cial suc­cess, when I stop try­ing to get what I want and start help­ing other peo­ple get what they want.

If you don't change, you will become extinct.

Questions of such gravity go down to the very foundations of the government. If the provisions of the Constitution can be set aside by an act of Congress, where is the course of usurpation to end?

The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows.

We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.

If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.

That strange new zone between medium and message. That zone we call the interface.

The problem is, there are definitely some genuinely lame things on television, and there's more at the bottom of the barrel, because the barrel in a sense has gotten bigger.

Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society.

I love those stretches where I've just been a writer - when I haven't been doing Internet start-ups - where I pretty much eliminate meetings from my life.

When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive.

Nothing really says ... interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 - than 'Click here for a picture of my dog.'

Without greater support for childcare, parents of young children may be forced to choose cheaper, poor quality care for their children or fail to provide it entirely.

You've got to keep things simple. Just identify what you need to do to launch, figure out what resources you need, and surround yourself with people who are much smarter than you!

There is no end to learning, but there are many beginnings.

Bankruptcy represents a longstanding commitment in this country to helping people get a fresh start. This principle has never been giving only certain people a fresh start.

Unless things change radically, President Bush will be the first President since Herbert Hoover to have presided over a net loss of jobs during his administration.

Simply cutting the taxes for America's wealthiest families is clearly not creating the needed new jobs, and that strategy is unlikely to succeed in the future.

Purge, emerge and flourish. It's natural.

Learning is a process whereby a human being, or group, or organization, or society comes to understand and embody nature's patterns.

I was raised in farm and ranch communities, and my dad wanted me to be a cowboy like him, but I saw how he struggled in life and wanted more than that.

I wonder what it's like out there?

We're born man, woman and sexual beings.

The cost of anything is the foregone alternative.

Nobody saw it, he (Rogers Hornsby) hit it and it disappeared.

All beauteous things for which we live By laws of space and time decay. But Oh, the very reason why I clasp them, is because they die.

Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

This is one of the disadvantages of wine, it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

Hell is paved with good intentions.

Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind.

Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerales.

It is necessary to hope... for hope itself is happiness.

In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.

You haven't learned anything until you learn to learn everything.

While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.

There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not know it.

Ignorance, when voluntary, is criminal, and a man may be properly charged with that evil which he neglected or refused to learn how to prevent.