Human war has been the most successful of all our cultural traditions.

Do you care about freedom? Dreams may have inspired it, and wishes prompted it, but only war and weapons have made it yours.

We are born of risen apes, not fallen angels.

Aggressiveness is the principal guarantor of survival.

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments?

Man is a fraction of the animal world. Our history is an afterthought, no more, tacked to an infinite calendar. We are not so unique as we should like to believe.

What could not be denied was that in vast segments of the animal world natural selection of the most qualified individuals took place not by competition for females but by competition for space.

There is a virtue, I must presume, in shamelessness, since by placing on parade the things one does not know, one discovers that no one else knows either.

The dog barking at you from behind his master's fence acts for a motive indistinguishable from that of his master when the fence was built.

Human war has been the most successful of our cultural traditions.

The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.

Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to each of us.

Books should be tried by a judge and jury as though they were crimes.

All the gods are dead except the god of war.

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.

Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.

The opening ceremony was good, although I missed it.

Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity.

[My father] had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy.

I hospitalized a rock, killed a brick...I'm so bad I make medicine sick!

In my heart, my first desire was to be a dancer. I always wanted to dance and I danced from the time I was 7 till I was well into my 30s.