Best Quotes by Joseph Heller (Top 10)
-
Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity, and some people have mediocrity thrust upon them.
Joseph Heller
-
...[A]nything worth dying for ... is certainly worth living for.
Joseph Heller
-
The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.
Joseph Heller
-
[They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.
Joseph Heller
-
Insanity is contagious.
Joseph Heller
-
What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. 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.
Joseph Heller
-
It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
Joseph Heller
-
The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.
Joseph Heller
-
I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.
Joseph Heller
-
Every writer I know has trouble writing.
Joseph Heller
More Joseph Heller Quotes
-
He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.
Joseph Heller
-
Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery, or simple bad luck.
Joseph Heller
-
When I grow up I want to be a little boy.
Joseph Heller
-
There was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to.
Joseph Heller
-
He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.
Joseph Heller
-
Rise above principle and do what's right.
Joseph Heller
-
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.
Joseph Heller
-
Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it.
Joseph Heller
-
Major Major had lied, and it was good. He was not really surprised that it was good, for he had observed that people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie.
Joseph Heller
-
Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.
Joseph Heller
-
Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about.
Joseph Heller
-
The night was full of horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts.......
Joseph Heller
-
¨ Oh, I´m not complaining. I know there´s a war on. I know a lot of people are going to have to suffer for us to win it. But why must I be one of them?¨
Joseph Heller
-
But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.
Joseph Heller
-
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.
Joseph Heller
-
He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
Joseph Heller