Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges – on gifts, trades, loans – and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.

Players now have a groin injury for months and months, and I often think they don’t really give a toss whether they’re playing or not because they’re getting paid anyway.

Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries – for heavy ones they cannot.

I think it quite likely that we are the only civilization within several hundred light years; otherwise we would have heard radio waves.

Virtuous people often revenge themselves for the constraints to which they submit by the boredom which they inspire.

If I inspire you, pay for it, period.

Before Nelson Mandela was arrested in 1962, he was an angry, relatively young man. He founded the ANC’s military wing. When he was released, he surprised everyone because he was talking about reconciliation and forgiveness and not about revenge.

I gave ‚em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.

Debt is a social and ideological construct, not a simple economic fact.

If you lose a big fight, it will worry you all of your life. It will plague you – until you get your revenge.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

A person who can’t pay gets another person who can’t pay to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don’t make either of them able to do a walking-match.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

You accept that this civilisation could be abolished and life will begin later on after a few thousand years because that is something that has happened in the history of this planet. When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair there is no hope.

Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.

A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

It shows nobility to be willing to increase your debt to a man to whom you already owe much.

Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.

One civilization after another has been wrecked upon the attempt to secure sufficient leadership from a single group or class.

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.

For my birthday I got a humidifier and a de-humidifier… I put them in the same room and let them fight it out.

To be angry is to revenge the faults of others on ourselves.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

I still have my first paycheck. It was just, I think, a dollar or two that I got when I started as a songwriter with BMI, and I had some songs there that I had through the company, and in the mail I got this big old check for, like, a dollar and a half or something. Somebody had recorded one of my songs.

Iraq is no diversion. It is a place where civilization is taking a decisive stand against chaos and terror, we must not waver.

It is not possible for civilization to flow backwards while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance it allotted length.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

I performed in a bowling alley before while people were still bowling. Cut the check, and I will perform anywhere.

My elder brothers were all put apprentices to different trades. I was put to the grammar-school at eight years of age, my father intending to devote me, as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the Church.

The problem is that the U.S. government is the biggest debtor in the world, and those depending on it to take care of them will only become poorer.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

Writing means sharing. It’s part of the human condition to want to share things – thoughts, ideas, opinions.

Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.

Revenge, lust, ambition, pride, and self-will are too often exalted as the gods of man’s idolatry; while holiness, peace, contentment, and humility are viewed as unworthy of a serious thought.

At my lowest point, I was nearly $700,000 in debt.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

I think really, China, Chinese, I think they really have a long history of civilization, rich culture.

I used to have insecurity about my finances, then I announced that I had debt, and now I don’t have any insecurities.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

When I was younger we had a grape arbor, and my mom would go out and pick grapes and make grape jam in the sink – boil it, put it in jars, and give it away as gifts.

We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.

The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.

It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

We get paid for bringing value to the market place.

It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

You can’t say civilization don’t advance… in every war they kill you in a new way.