Quotes from Joseph Heller

What can you tell your children today that will not leave them frightened and sad?

it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything

But we were powerless too, because they did have those chariots and archers and suits of armor, and until me, no Israelite could win a pitched battle on low ground without employing some clandestine or psychological device or receiving supernatural assistance in the form of some rare aberration of nature.

His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce.

Yossarian was not sure he liked being invested in.

A situation in which a desired outcome or solution is impossible to attain because of a set of inherently illogical rules or conditions.

You have a morbid aversion to dying. You probably resent the fact that you're at war and might get your head blown off any second.

While none of the work we do is very important, it is important that we do a great deal of it. Don't you agree?

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was

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

Bureaucracy, as Hannah Arendt defined it: the rule of nobody. Roll

Even people who were not there remembered vividly exactly what happened next.

They had not brains enough to be introverted and repressed.

I had the strongest trade association in the world backing me up.

The men could pick up girls along that road if they promised to take them where they wanted to go, buxom, young, homely, grinning girls with missing teeth whom they could drive off the road and lie down in the wild grass with, and Yossarian did whenever he could, which was not nearly as often as Hungry Joe, who could get a jeep but couldn't drive, begged him to try.

hands I could deny there were crab apples in my cheeks. Every time someone asked me why I was walking around with crab apples in my cheeks, I'd just open my hands and show them it was rubber balls I was walking around with, not crab apples, and that they were in my hands, not my cheeks. It was a good story. But I never knew if it got across or not, since it's pretty tough to make people understand you when you're talking to them with two crab apples in your cheeks.

Ideals are good, but people are sometimes not so good.

O piloto] Orr era louco e podia ser dado por incapaz. Bastava-lhe pedir, e a partir do momento em que o fizesse deixaria de ser louco e teria de participar em novas missões. Seria louco se participasse em novas missões e mentalmente são se não o fizesse, mas neste último caso teria de voltar a voar. Se o fizesse, seria louco e não teria de o fazer, mas se não quisesse, estaria em plena posse das faculdades mentais e deveria fazê-lo.

mean there's a catch?" "Sure there's a catch," Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy." There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.

I used to get a big kick out of saving people's lives. Now I wonder what the hell's the point, since they all have to die anyway.

For Catch-22 is the unwritten law which empowers the authorities to revoke your rights whenever it suits their cruel whims; it is, in short, the principle of absolute evil in a malevolent, mechanical, and incompetent world.

He was constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope.

Why him? There just doesn't seem to be any logic to this system of rewards and punishment. Look what happened to me. If I had gotten syphilis or a dose of clap for my five minutes of passion on the beach instead of this damned mosquito bite, I could see justice. But malaria? Malaria? Who can explain malaria as a consequence of fornication?

I sometimes think of myself as Fortinbras — ha, ha — in the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, who just keeps circling and circling around the action until everything else falls apart, and then strolls in at the end to pick up all the pieces for himself.