Joseph Heller Quotes

The really great thing about having two TV shows going on at the same time is that I can go to one and say that I have to go and visit the other, and then I can just go home, and they don't know.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

The first casualty when war comes is truth.

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.

A defection is better than a surrender, a surrender is better than a capture, and a capture is better than a kill.

No sir, anybody who went out and got into the front line trenches to fight for liberty was a goddamn fool and the guy who got him there was a liar.

You have deceived our trust, and made us doff our easy robes of peace, to crush our old limbs in ungentle steel.

How do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists, then believe what they read.

Well, politics is war, and in war, truth is the first casualty.

There's no such thing as a war against terrorism. It's idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It's advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed.

there couldn't be war, unless lies were believed. War has to be nourished by lies.

Let the gulled fool the toil of war pursue, where bleed the many to enrich the few.

Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss. Ask yourselves how this gracious reception of our petition comports with those warlike preparations which cover our waters and darken our land. Are fleets and armies necessary to a work of love and reconciliation? Have we shown ourselves so unwilling to be reconciled, that force must be called in to win back our love? Let us not deceive ourselves, sir. These are the implements of war and subjugationthe last arguments to which kings resort.

In war, truth is often the first casualty.

We lie. That's what we do. You're selling me a line of bullshit and you want me to sell you a line of bullshit back so you can write a major line of bullshit and be paid for it.

When a guy says "I have no idea what you're talking about" it means "I'm thinking of exactly what you're saying I did while I lie to you."

The first atrocity, the first war crime committed in any war of aggression by the aggressors is against the truth.

You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.

Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived.

I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself

Though the Americans can be fooled, as they have been, and they can be propagandized, as they have been... But, as Lincoln said, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. But you can't fool all of the people all of the time." And so hope lies in the fact that little by little, even if the American people can be fooled, even if they continue to be fooled in the 2004 presidential election, they will gradually learn, as they have learned - for instance, in the Vietnam War and turned against the Vietnam War.

The first casualty in any war is the truth. In World War II, I was part of a group of people who used to meet once a week with the sole purpose of analyzing the news and trying to work out what we weren't being told. We thought that we were clever, but we had absolutely no idea what was really going on. It was only years later that we learned the true story.

All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.

In California, 50 women protested the impending war with Iraq by lying on the ground naked and spelling out the word peace. Right idea, wrong president.

Novels are usually built on conflict, sometimes very, very difficult conflict. It's why men write war novels - because there you go, there's the conflict writ large.