I go where the sound of thunder is.

Every Marine is, first and foremost, a rifleman. All other conditions are secondary.

Communications without intelligence is noise. Intelligence without communications is irrelevant.

There's no such thing as a crowded battlefield. Battlefields are lonely places.

I don't run democracy. I train troops to defend democracy and I happen to be their surrogate father and mother as well as their commanding general.

Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical -- but they were just dry wanks.

Before civilization, artists painted for the living. Today, most paint for a living.

Cruelty is easy, cheap and rampant.

Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done.

I have no doubt that in the future, the laws that criminalize human love and commitment will look the way the apartheid laws do to us now, so obviously wrong

I understand that smoking is vaguely inappropriate in certain situations. You know, like an orphanage, cancer ward, whatever.

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak; and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old.

Tim was dead. And he's always been a loser. I'd be damned if I was going to be the victim of a loser - or anyone else.

I was not self-destructive, though I almost destroyed myself. In the end, I turned away from stand-up with a tired swivel of my head...