“Are we entirely ready, sir?" said Lieutenant Hornett, with the special inflection that means "We are not entirely ready, sir.""We had better be. Glory awaits, gentlemen. In the words of General Tacticus, 'let us take history by the scrotum.' Of course, he was not a very honourable fighter.”

“Indeed,' he said, tapping his fingers very rapidly on the desk. 'Indeed. I'm very pleased to know you, sir. Do me the honour of sitting down.'Blinking reproachfully at Fen, Cadogan obeyed, though as to what honour he could be doing Mr Rosseter in lowering his behind on to a leather chair he was not entirely clear.”

“Last night in the latrine. Didn't you whisper that we couldn't punish you to that other dirty son of a bitch we don't like? What's his name?""Yossarian, sir," Lieutenant Scheisskopf said."Yes, Yossarian. That's right. Yossarian. Yossarian? Is that his name? Yossarian? What the hell kind of a name is Yossarian?"Lieutenant Scheisskopf had the facts at his finger tips. "It's Yossarian's name, sir," he explained.”

“We live, I suppose, in the unconfessed hope that the rules will at some point be broken, along with the normal course of things and custom and history, and that this will happen to us, that we will experience it, that we — that is, I alone — will be the ones to see it. We always aspire, I suppose, to being the chosen ones, and it is unlikely otherwise that we would be prepared to live out the entire course of an entire life, which, however short or long, gradually gets the better of us.”

“Locked, cocked, and ready to rock, sir!”

“Bertrand Russell declared that, in case he met God, he would say to Him, "Sir, you did not give us enough information." I would add to that, "All the same, Sir, I'm not persuaded that we did the best we could with the information we had. Toward the end there, anyway, we had tons of information.”