“Real happiness, in politics, is a wide-open hammer shot on some poor bastard who knows he's been trapped, but can't flee.”

“Poor bastard. Wait 'till he sees the bats. ”

“I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time.”

“Most of my friends are into strange things I don't really understand - and with a few shameful exceptions I wish them all well. Who am I, after all, to tell some friend he shouldn't change his name to Oliver High, get rid of his family, and join a Satanism cult in Seattle? Or to argue with another friend who wants to buy a single-shot Remington Fireball so he can go out and shoot cops from a safe distance?”

“Some book reviewer whose name I forget recently called me a 'vicious misanthrope' . . . or maybe it was a 'cynical misanthrope'. . . but either way, he (or she) was right; and what got me this way was politics.”

“Anybody who thinks that 'it doesn't matter who's President' has never been Drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid war on the other side of the world--or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on public property--or been hounded by the IRS for purely political reasons--or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts wanting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That is when you will wish you had voted.”

“The prevailing quality of life in America -- by any accepted methods of measuring -- was unarguably freer and more politically open under Nixon than it is today in this evil year of Our Lord 2002.”