Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

The thing that most people didn't understand, if they weren't in his line if work, was that a rape victim and a victim of a fatal accident were both gone forever. The difference was that the rape victim still had to go through the motions of being alive.

And Hale was devoted to President Kennedy, and there was some talk following the assassination that Hale had warned the President not to go to Dallas, and the connotation was that it would be physically dangerous for him to do so.

I'm trying to finish my book on the Kennedy assassination.

a direct admission that we are responsible for negligence which might have resulted in the assassination of the President [JFK].

… the [Warren] report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards, and I think the people who read it in the long-run future will see that. I frankly believe that we have shown that the [investigation of the] John F. Kennedy assassination was snuffed out before it even began.

Letters have been found with my name on assassination lists.

I would not call myself a veteran conspiracy theorist. Or an obsessed one. I pretty much peaked on the whole conspiracy theory thing in the '60s, with the grassy knoll, who really killed JFK, and who ordered the hit on Lee Harvey Oswald.

The CIA could not face up to the American people and admit that its former employees had conspired to assassinate the President; so from the moment Kennedy's heart stopped beating, the Agency attempted to sweep the whole conspiracy under the rug.

The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. It's like a cancer that's metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?

My theory is that Kurt had a lot of residual pain from his childhood. And when you pile that on top of his experience in World War II - he was in Dresden when it was bombed and saw a city annihilated. When you combine those two things, my impression of Kurt Vonnegut at 84 was that he was a very pained and haunted man.

The psychology of brutality was worse than the beatings.

Such persons are windows through which one looks into terrible worlds.

People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure

Lee Harvey Oswald was under surveillance by the FBI for months before the assassination.

I have survivor's remorse.

He did not know which was more painful, the waking or the sleeping. When he slept, he dreamed: dark disturbing dreams of blood and broken promises. When he woke, there was nothing to do but think, and his waking thoughts were worse than nightmares.

When a man is hit by Friendly Fire, his blood pressure lowers and his morale sinks. I have been hit by Friendly Fire in my heart. Sighs spill from my body instead of blood.

When you die of sorrow it's as if you've broken all the bones in your body, bruised yourself all over, cracked your skull. That's sorrow.

Its so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That's above and beyond everything else, and it's not a mental complaint-it's a physical thing, like it's physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don't come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people's words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.

[Bruce] sees a lot of himself in [Batman], you know? You could argue that something even worse than what happened to Bruce happened to [Duke's] parents, who are now Joker-ized*. They're not just gone or irretrievably lost. And I'm NOT curing them, so you can put that out there! There's no relief from that.

The misery stayed, not thought about but aching away, and sometimes I would have to ask myself, Why do I ache? Men can get used to anything, but it takes time.

Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.

Now it is nothing but torture.

Intense, unexpected suffering passes more quickly than suffering that is apparently bearable; the latter goes on for years and, without our noticing, eats away at our souls, until, one day, we are no longer able to free ourselves from the bitterness and it stays with us for the rest of our lives.