John Barth Quotes

Cruelty is a part of nature, at least of human nature, but it is the one thing that seems unnatural to us.

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day and the best at murder are those who preach against it and the best at hate are those who preach love and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

The humble and meek are thirsting for blood.

We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.

It is hard to imagine, considering the inherent silliness, cruelty and superstition of the human race, how it has contrived to last as long as it has. The witch-hunting, the torturing, the gullibility, the massacres, the intolerance, the wild futility of human behaviour over the centuries is hardly credible. And the laws, as they stand today, are almost inconceivably stupid. With all this brilliant scientific knowledge of atom splitting and nuclear physics, etc., we are still worshipping at different shrines, imprisoning homosexuals, imposing unnecessary and completely irrelevant restrictions on each other. Hearts can be withdrawn from human beasts, dead hearts, and, after a little neat manipulation, popped back again as good as new. The skies can be conquered. Sputniks can whiz round and round the globe and be controlled and guided. People are still genuflecting before crucifixes and Virgin Marys, still persecuting other people for being coloured or Jewish or in some way different from what they apparently should be. There are wars being waged at this very moment in Indonesia, Algeria, the Middle East, Cyprus, etc. The Pope still makes pronouncements against birth control. The Ku-Klux-Klan is still, if permitted, ready to dash out and do some light lynching. God, for millions of people, is still secure in his heaven, and My Fair Lady opened in London last night.

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion--several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven....

Let us face squarely the paradox that the world which goes to war is a world, usually, genuinely desiring peace.

I was born in 1962, and it seems that throughout my entire life the world has demanded peace but maintained conflict.

People who talk about peace are very often the most quarrelsome.

Cruel men cry easily at the cinema.

The dagger plunged in the name of freedom is plunged into the breast of freedom.

Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.

Contradiction is the heart and soul of character and drama. You're always looking for it. I loved her so much I hit her; that's character. I loved her so much I hit her again; that's even more character.

Sometimes a fireman will go to great strenuous lengths to save a raccoon that's stuck in a drainpipe and then go out on the weekend and kill several of them for amusement.

Men are cruel, but Man is kind.

You don't believe in war, but what's that gun you're totin'.

Though we talk peace, we wage war. Sometimes we even wage war in the name of peace. Does that seem paradoxical? Well, war is not afraid of paradoxes.

Don't interrupt me while I'm interrupting.

Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.

It is tragic-comic to see that all this knowledge and understanding exercises no power at all over men's lives, that their lives do not express in the remotest way what they have understood, but rather the opposite.

The melancholy have the best sense of the comic, the opulent often the best sense of the rustic, the dissolute often the best sense of the moral, and the doubter often the best sense of the religious.

Alas,we who wanted kindness, could not be kind ourselves.

People want to change everything and, at the same time, want it all to remain the same.

Anglers boast of the innocence of their pastime; yet it puts fellow-creatures to the torture. They pique themselves on their meditative faculties; and yet their only excuse is a want of thought.