Joseph Heller quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Joseph Heller has a lot to say. In this list we present the 59 best Joseph Heller quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
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Joseph Heller quotes
I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.
— Joseph Heller
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
— Joseph Heller
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. 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. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.”That’s some catch, that Catch-22, ” he observed.”It’s the best there is, ” Doc Daneeka agreed.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Why are they going to disappear him?’I don’t know.’It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t even good grammar.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it then seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven?
— Joseph Heller, Catch 22
History did not demand Yossarian’s premature demise, justice could be satisfied without it, progress did not hinge upon it, victory did not depend on it. That men would die was a matter of necessity; WHICH men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance. 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, Catch-22
They couldn’t keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
What the hell are you getting so upset about?” he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. “I thought you didn’t believe in God.””I don’t, ” she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. “But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Every writer I know has trouble writing.
— Joseph Heller
There’s nothing mysterious about it, He’s not working at all. He’s playing. Or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?
— Joseph Heller, Catch 22
The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
The enemy, ” retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, “is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don’t you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Major Major never sees anyone in his office while he’s in his office.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
-You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You’re dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
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, Catch-22
He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt…
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
The captain was a good chess player, and the games were always interesting. Yossarian had stopped playing chess with him because the games were so interesting they were foolish.
— Joseph Heller
But Yossarian knew he was right, because, as he explained to Clevinger, to the best of his knowledge he had never been wrong.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Colonel Cathcart is our commanding officer and we must obey him. Why don’t you fly four more missions and see what happens?””I don’t want to.””Suppose we let you pick your missions and fly milk runs?” Major Major said. “That way you can fly the four missions and not run any risks.””I don’t want to fly milk runs. I don’t want to be in the war anymore.””Would you like to see our country lose?” Major Major asked.”We won’t lose. We’ve got more men, more money, and more material. There are ten million men in uniform who could replace me. Some people are getting killed and a lot more are making money and having fun. Let somebody else get killed.””But suppose everybody on our side felt that way?””Then I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way. Wouldn’t I?
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
He found Luciana sitting alone at a table in the Allied officers’ night club, where the drunken Anzac major who had brought her there had been stupid enough to desert her for the ribald company of some singing comrades at the bar.”All right, I’ll dance with you, ” she said, before Yossarian could even speak. “But I won’t let you sleep with me.””Who asked you?” Yossarian asked her.”You don’t want to sleep with me?” she exclaimed with surprise.”I don’t want to dance with you.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Nurse Duckett found Yossarian wonderful and was already trying to change him.
— Joseph Heller
Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur.
— Joseph Heller, Something Happened
My fish dream is a sex dream.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
It takes brains not to make money, ” Colonel Cargill wrote in one of the homiletic memoranda he regularly prepared for circulation over General Peckem’s signature. “Any fool can make money these days and most of them do. But what about people with talent and brains? Name, for example, one poet who makes money.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Nately had a bad start. He came from a good family.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
No such private nights of ecstasy or hushed-up drinking and sex orgies ever occurred. They might have occurred if either General Dreedle or General Peckem had once evinced an interest in taking part in orgies with him, but neither ever did, and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
The spirit gone, man is garbage.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
She reminded him of (…) all the shivering, stupefying misery in a world that never yet had provided enough heat and food and justice for all but an ingenious and unscrupulous handful. What a lousy earth!
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
I don’t want to make sacrifices. I want to make dough.
— Joseph Heller
That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance.
— Joseph Heller
That goddam stunted, red-faced, big-cheeked, apple-cheeked, curlyheaded, midget assed, , google-eyed, undersized, grinning, buck-toothed rat!!” Yossarian sputtered.~ Catch-22
— Joseph Heller
There was shish-kabob for lunch, huge, savory hunks of spitted meat sizzling like the devil over charcoal after marinating seventy-two hours in a secret mixture Milo had stolen from a crooked trader in the Levant, served with Iranian rice and asparagus tips Parmesan, followed by cherries jubilee for dessert and then steaming cups of fresh coffee with Benedictine and brandy.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
The chaplain had sinned, and it was good. Common sense told him that telling lies and defecting from duty were sins. On the other hand, everyone knew that sin was evil and that no good could come from evil. But he did feel good; he felt positively marvelous. Consequently, it followed logically that telling lies and defecting from duty could not be sins. The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Depreciating motels, junked automobiles, and quick-food joints grow like amber waves of grain.
— Joseph Heller, Something Happened
All through the night, men looked at the sky and were saddened by the stars.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow.
— Joseph Heller
[Chief White Halfoat:] Racial prejudice is a terrible thing, Yossarian. It really is. It’s a terrible thing to treat a decent, loyal Indian like a nigger, kike, wop, or spic.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Who’s they?” He wanted to know. “Who, specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?””Every one of them, ” Yossarian told him.”Every one of whom?””Every one of whom do you think?””I haven’t any idea.””Then how do you know they aren’t?””Because…” Clevinger sputtered, and turned speechless with frustration. Clevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn’t know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn’t funny at all.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Oh well, ” McWatt sang, “what the hell.
— Joseph Heller
It doesn’t matter whether they mean it or not. That’s why they make little kids pledge allegiance even before they know what ‘pledge’ and ‘allegiance’ mean.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
…You know, one good apple can spoil the rest, ” Colonel Korn concluded with conscious irony.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
General Peckem even recommends that we send our men into combat in full-dress uniform so they’ll make a good impression on the enemy when they’re shot down”.
— Joseph Heller, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
They were frisky, eager and exuberant, and they had all been friends in the States. They were plainly unthinkable. They were noisy, overconfident, empty-headed kids of twenty-one. They had gone to college and were engaged to pretty, clean girls whose pictures were already standing on the rough cement mantelpiece of Orr’s fireplace. They had ridden in speedboats and played tennis. They had been horseback riding. One had once been to bed with an older woman. They knew the same poeple in different parts of the country and had gone to school with each other’s cousins.
— Joseph Heller
Hungry Joe was crazy, and no one knew it better than Yossarian, who did everything he could to help him. Hungry Joe just wouldn’t listen to Yossarian. Hungry Joe just wouldn’t listen because he thought Yossarian was crazy
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Politically, he was a humanitarian who did know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. 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.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
And he knew something else as a social evolutionist that he might stress someday in his ‘Every Change Is for the Worse’ should he ever find time to write it: Gold knew that the most advanced and penultimate stage of a civilization was attained when chaos masqueraded as order, and he knew we were already there.
— Joseph Heller
He woke up blinking with a slight pain in his head and opened his eyes upon a world boiling in chaos in which everything was in proper order.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
The important thing is to keep them pledging, ” he explained to his cohorts. “It doesn’t matter whether they mean it or not. That’s why they make little kids pledge allegiance even before they know what ‘pledge’ and ‘allegiance’ mean.
— Joseph Heller
Nobody would have anything to do with him. He began to drop things and to trip. He had a shy and hopeful manner in each new contact, and he was always disappointed. Because he NEEDED a friend so desperately, he never found one.
— Joseph Heller
He was pinched perspinngly in the epistemological dilemma of the skeptic, unable to accept solutions to problems he was unwilling to dismiss as unsolvable. He was never without misery, and never without hope.
— Joseph Heller
There is no disappointment so numbing…as someone no better than you achieving more.
— Joseph Heller
Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.’That’s some catch, that Catch-22, ‘ he observed.’It’s the best there is, ‘ Doc Daneeka agreed.Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn’t quite sure he saw it at all, just the way he was never quite sure about good modern art or about the flies Orr saw in Appleby’s eyes. he had Orr’s word to take for Appleby’s eyes.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?” “I do, ” Dunbar told him. “Why?” Clevinger asked. “What else is there?
— Joseph Heller
Every writer I know has trouble writing.
— 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
Frankly I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.
— Joseph Heller
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22 which specified the 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
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
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