What is generally termed reality is, to be precise, a frothy nothing.

The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?

I don't want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people's inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own.

We should burn all libraries and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of the legend would then begin.

Everywhere, the ethical predicament of our time imposes itself with an urgency which suggests that even the question Have we anything to eat? will be answered not in material but in ethical terms.

No such thing as humanity without flaws.

It's inspiration that counts, not the drill.

Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch?

Every word that is spoken and sung here (the Cabaret Voltaire) represents at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect.

He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence — of talking without meaning — is never effaced.

There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.

I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of [CIA] sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of traitors.

Sincerity is a great but rare virtue, and we pardon to it much complaining, and the betrayal of many weaknesses.

Integrity is praised and then left out in the cold.

I try to let my decisions be guided not by what I think will succeed or fail, but what I'm going to learn from that process.

The person who sows a single beautiful thought in the mind of another, renders the world a greater service than that rendered by all the faultfinders combined.

One thing I've learned from 35 years in the classroom is that people learn best when they are laughing, when they are emotionally hit, that it's both the brain and the heart.

The God worth worshipping is the one who pays us the compliment of self - regulation, and we might return it by minding our own business.

Anything a person chases in life runs away.