When in doubt, just tell 'em it was Carlin or Vonnegut.

"Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read. Forget I mentioned it. This song has no message. Rise for the flag salute."

"Rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, in order to provide articles for people who can't read."

"Remember there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over."

-Frank Zappa

edit: How could I forget this one?

"A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole."

 

Came across this one today:

"The greatest tool is the willingness to change. You can try everything--every program, every technique--but if you're not really willing, then it won't work."

 

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." - Charles Darwin

What I got from this is that an inqusitive mind never stops looking for answers, and is never entirely sure of the truth.

"I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing." - Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy's oddball personality and obsessive dedication to his work just shines in this quote.

"Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself." - Henry Miller

Henry Miller was a lot of things, but boring was not one of them. Read everything of his you can get your hands on.

"I am just another fool and I have to keep telling myself that." - Joey Cape

Cape is one of the great songwriters of our time. If you're familiar with his work, count yourself lucky. If not, start with Bad Astronaut's "Houston, We Have A Drinking Problem", and go from there.

 

There is a Persian proverb that gets tossed around in our family a lot. Every time life seems so unbearable that I will never make it through, I just remember:

Een neez begozarad, this too shall pass.

 

Jews have a similar quote: "This too shall suck."

 

There's also the description of every Jewish holiday that's pretty useful: "They tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat."

From The Tempest:
"If thou more murmur'st, I will rend an oak
And peg thee in his knotty entrails till
Thou hast howl'd away twelve winters."

What a great way to say, "shut the fuck up or I'll get a stick and put it so far up your ass you'll be screaming for 12 years."

"If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses."
- Henry Miller

"I see that behind the daily annoyances and intrusions, behind the cheap, glittering malice of the feeble and inert, there stands the symbol of life's frustrating power, and that he who would create order, he who would sow strife and discord, because he is imbued with will, such a man must go again and again to the stake and the gibbet. I see that behind the nobility of his gestures there lurks the specter of the ridiculousness of it all - that he is not only sublime, but absurd."
- Henry Miller

"What is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound."
- Edgar Allan Poe

"When you've got concrete plans, the best way to keep them concrete is keep them to yourself."
- Malcolm X


"Wilderness isn't wild anymore or threatening; wildlife needs human protection to exist at all."
- Toni Morrison

"Them, the aliens, the people who in a mere hundred years had killed a world millions of years old. From Micronesia to Liverpool, from Kentucky to Dresden, they killed everything they touched including their own coastlines, their own hills and forests. And even when some of them built something nice and human, they grew vicious protecting it from their own predatory children, let alone an outsider."
- Toni Morrison

 

Mistakes and failure aren't the same. I make mistakes in life, but only fail if I don't learn from them.

 

"Pussy is a nice side dish to a good life."

 

-Dennis Miller

-Benjamin Franklin

-Al Jourgensen

-Tinker from Roadhouse

 

"When you talk to God, it's called prayer. When God talks to you, it's called schizophrenia."

 

With all the things that have gone with the Occupy movement, one of my favorite quotes becomes relevant:

“Of all forms of government and society, those of free men and women are in many respects the most brittle. They give the fullest freedom for activities of private persons and groups who often identify their own interests, essentially selfish, with the general welfare.” - Dorothy Thompson

Also:

"Force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authority is derived. Naked force has resolved more issues throughout history than any other factor, and the contrary opinion that violence never solves anything, is wishful thinking at its worst. People who forget that always pay." - Robert A. Heinlein

and a personal favorite from one of the best trainers of all time:

"The hero and the coward both feel the same thing, but the hero uses his fear, projects it onto his opponent, while the coward runs. It's the same thing, fear, but it's what you do with it that matters." - Cus D'Amato