Charles Bukowski Quotes

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.

The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.

Watch out for the average--they're usually hiding something big.

And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?

Ordinary men commonly condemn what is beyond them.

I am an average good Christian, when you don't push my Christianity too far. And all the rest of you—which is a great comfort—are, in this respect, much the same as I am.

Few are sufficiently wise to prefer censure which is useful to praise which is treacherous.

Many things that come into the world are not looked into. The individual says 'My crowd doesn't run that way.' I say, don't run with crowds.

For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.

For God’s sake, let us be men not monkeys minding machines or sitting with our tails curled while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone. Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.

Love is a state of being, and in that state, the 'me', with its identifications, anxieties, and possessions is absent. Love cannot be, as long as the activities of the self, of the 'me', whether conscious or unconscious, continue to exist.

That, however, is - mediocrity, though it be called moderation.

Love is not a higher quality than truth.

To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.

Who are you?" she inquired, as the cat passed by. I'm the cat that looked at a king," he replied. And I," she remarked with a toss of her head, "am the cow that jumped over the moon." Is that so?" said the cat. "Whatever for?" The cow stared. She had never been asked that question before. And suddenly it occured to her that there might something else to do than jumping over moons.

Nothing. There's nothing you can do. As soon as you do something you'll no-longer be average.

A certain type of man, when he loves for the first time, his love is not really love, it is possession. Possessions don't have rights or feelings; they are something to owned and controlled. He had spent more than a year trying to do just that, and failing.

I know a good many people, I think, who are bigots, and who know they are bigots, and are sorry for it, but they dare not be anything else.

The Voice has been politically correct in many of its aspects since before that term was ever used.

It is as great a spite to be praised in the wrong place, and by a wrong person, as can be done to a noble nature.

To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.

The man who does not wish to be one of the mass only needs to cease to be easy on himself.

If you have political convictions... keep 'em to yourself

We have to face the unpleasant as well as the affirmative side of the human story, including our own story as a nation, our own stories of our peoples. We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality. Otherwise, we are squeezed empty and filled with what other people want us to think and feel and experience.