Top 200 Joseph Heller Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Be thankful you’re healthy.” “Be bitter you’re not going to stay that way.” “Be glad you’re even alive.” “Be furious you’re going to die.”

— Joseph Heller

102. “Don’t be such an ass, Scheisskopf. People have a right to do anything that’s not forbidden by law, and there’s no law against lying to you.”

— Joseph Heller

103. “I frequently feel I’m being taken advantage of merely because I’m asked to do the work I’m paid to do.”

— Joseph Heller

104. “I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.”

— Joseph Heller

105. “You wouldn’t be normal if you were never afraid. Even the bravest men experience fear. One of the biggest jobs we all face in combat is to overcome fear.”

— Joseph Heller

106. “The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with.”

— Joseph Heller

107. “I wouldn’t want to live without strong misgivings.”

— Joseph Heller

108. “Sure there’s a catch,” Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.” There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.”

— Joseph Heller

109. “Major Major had lied, and it was good. He was not really surprised that it was good, for he had observed that people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie.”

— Joseph Heller

110. “Know what I mean? You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” Yossarian knew what he meant. “That’s not what I meant,” Doc Daneeka said as Yossarian began scratching his back.”

— Joseph Heller

111. “It was just before dawn during the Great Big Siege of Bologna, when tongueless dead men peopled the night hours like living ghosts and Hungry Joe was half out of his mind with anxiety because he had finished his missions.”

— Joseph Heller

112. “They couldn’t him because he was Tarzan, Mandrake, Flash Gordon. He was Bill Shakespeare. He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Dreirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees. He was miracle ingredient Z-247.”

— Joseph Heller

113. “Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window, and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.”

— Joseph Heller

114. “Prostitution gives her an opportunity to meet people. It provides fresh air and wholesome exercise, and it keeps her out of trouble.”

— Joseph Heller

115. “Everybody is as unstable as water.”

— Joseph Heller

116. “Moses has the Ten Commandments, it’s true, but I’ve got much better lines – King David.”

— Joseph Heller

117. “Death was irreversible, he suspected, and he began to think he was going to lose.”

— Joseph Heller

118. “Colonel Cathcart was impervious to absolutes. He could measure his own progress only in relationship to others, and his idea of excellence was to do something at least as well as all the men his own age who were doing the same thing even better.”

— Joseph Heller

119. “He mashed hundreds of cakes of GI soap into the sweet potatoes just to show that people have the taste of Philistines and don’t know the difference between good and bad.”

— Joseph Heller

120. “His goading remained gentle. “Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you really think your own country will last? Forever? Keep in mind that the earth itself is destined to be destroyed by the sun in twenty-five million years or so.”

— Joseph Heller

121. “He was pinched perspiringly in the epistemological dilemma of the skeptic, unable to accept solutions to problems he was unwilling to dismiss as unsolvable. He was never without misery, and never without hope.”

— Joseph Heller

122. “Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur.”

— Joseph Heller

123. “The only thing going on was a war, and no one seemed to notice but Yossarian and Dunbar. And when Yossarian tried to remind people, they drew away from him and thought he was crazy.”

— Joseph Heller

124. “The night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves. What a welcome sight a leper must have been!”

— Joseph Heller

125. “Only Hungry Joe had something better to do each time he finished his missions. He had screaming nightmares and won fist fights with Huple’s cat.”

— Joseph Heller

126. “The captain was a good chess player, and the games were always interesting. Yossarian had stopped playing chess with him because the games were so interesting they were foolish.”

— Joseph Heller

127. “Hungry Joe was crazy, and no one knew it better than Yossarian, who did everything he could to help him. Hungry Joe just wouldn’t listen to Yossarian. Hungry Joe just wouldn’t listen because he thought Yossarian was crazy.”

— Joseph Heller

128. “All over the world, boys on every side of bomb line were laying down their lives for what they had been told was their country, and no one seemed to mind, least of all the boys who were laying down their young lives.”

— Joseph Heller

129. “Like all the other officers at Group Headquarters except Major Danby, Colonel Cathcart was infused with the democratic spirit: he believed that all men were created equal, and he therefore spurned all men outside Group Headquarters with equal fervor.”

— Joseph Heller

130. “They can do anything we can’t stop them from doing.”

— Joseph Heller

131. “He could not make them understand that he was a crotchety old fogey of twenty-eight, that he belonged to another generation, another era, another world, that having a good time bored him and was not worth the effort, and that they bored him, too. He could not make them shut up; they were worse than women. They had not brains enough to be introverted and repressed.”

— Joseph Heller

132. “I don’t want to make sacrifices. I want to make dough.”

— Joseph Heller

133. “Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskoph had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times.”

— Joseph Heller

134. “You know, that might be the answer – to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail.”

— Joseph Heller

135. “Yossarian – the very sight of the name made Colonel Cathcart shudder. There were so many esses in it. It just had to be subversive. It was like the word “subversive” itself. It was like “seditious” and “insidious” too, and like “socialist,” “suspicious,” “fascist” and “Communist.” It was an odious, alien, distasteful name, a name that just did not inspire confidence.”

— Joseph Heller

136. “Nobody would have anything to do with him. He began to drop things and to trip. He had a shy and hopeful manner in each new contact, and he was always disappointed. Because he NEEDED a friend so desperately, he never found one.”

— Joseph Heller

137. “Erogenous zones are either everywhere or nowhere.”

— Joseph Heller

138. “I don’t,” she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. “But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.”

— Joseph Heller

139. “Superman?’ Clevinger cried. ‘Superman?’ ‘Supraman,’ Yossarian corrected.”

— Joseph Heller

140. “Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. and Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father, or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action.”

— Joseph Heller

141. “Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?”

— Joseph Heller

142. “Yossarian wrinkled his forehead with quizzical amusement. “You won’t marry me because I’m crazy, and you say I’m crazy because I want to marry you? Is that right?”

— Joseph Heller

143. “I never even realized I was Jewish until I was practically grown up. Or rather, I used to feel that everybody in the world was Jewish, which amounts to the same thing.”

— Joseph Heller

144. “If a man is going to leave one wife to marry another, it’s better if he divorces the first before he marries the second.”

— Joseph Heller

145. “Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily.”

— Joseph Heller

146. “It takes brains not to make money,” Colonel Cargill wrote in one of the homiletic memoranda he regularly prepared for circulation over General Peckem’s signature. “Any fool can make money these days and most of them do. But what about people with talent and brains? Name, for example, one poet who makes money.”

— Joseph Heller

147. “I can’t start writing until I have a closing line.”

— Joseph Heller

148. “The chaplain glanced at the bridge table that served as his desk and saw only the abominable orange-red, pear-shaped, plum tomato he had obtained that same morning from Colonel Cathcart, still lying on its side where he had forgotten it like an indestructible and incarnadine symbol of his own ineptitude.”

— Joseph Heller

149. “That’s my trouble, you know,” Yossarian mused sympathetically, folding his arms. “Between me and every ideal I always find Scheisskopfs, Peckems, Korns and Cathcarts. And that sort of changes the ideal.”

— Joseph Heller

150. “Yossarian left money in the old woman’s lap – it was odd how many wrongs leaving money seemed to right – and.”

— Joseph Heller