Top 200 Joseph Heller Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Under Colonel Korn’s rule, the only people permitted to ask questions were those who never did. Soon the only people attending were those who never asked questions, and the sessions were discontinued altogether, since Clevinger, the corporal and Colonel Korn agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.”

— Joseph Heller

152. “Sure, there’s a catch,” Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”

— Joseph Heller

153. “The enemy,” retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, “is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don’t you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live.”

— Joseph Heller

154. “And anything worth dying for.”

— Joseph Heller

155. “Little by little, or maybe all at once, everything comes to mean its opposite; unreason argues itself into reason, and vice versa, and we cannot see the seams.”

— Joseph Heller

156. “Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions then he is caught in Catch-22: if he flies he is crazy, and doesn’t have to; but if he doesn’t want to he must be sane and has to. That’s some catch...”

— Joseph Heller

157. “I don’t think the ‘what’ distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the ‘how.’”

— Joseph Heller

158. “You pompous, rotund, neighborly, vacuous, complacent... – Yossarian.”

— Joseph Heller

159. “That’s not what justice is,” the colonel jeered, and began pounding the table again with his big fat hand. “That’s what Karl Marx is. I’ll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning. Garroting. That’s what justice is when we’ve all got to be tough enough and rough enough to fight Billy Petrolle. From the hip. Get it?”

— Joseph Heller

160. “Suppose everyone on our side felt that way?”

— Joseph Heller

161. “Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about.”

— Joseph Heller

162. “The promises of maniacs, like those of women, are not safely relied upon.”

— Joseph Heller

163. “He felt imprisoned in an airplane. In an airplane there was absolutely no place in the world to go except to another part of the airplane.”

— Joseph Heller

164. “He felt imprisoned in an airplane. In an airplane there was absolutely no place in the world to go except to another part of the airplane. Doc Daneeka had been told that people who enjoyed climbing into an airplane were really giving vent to a subconscious desire to climb back into the womb.”

— Joseph Heller

165. “It isn’t necessary to call me Father, the chaplain explained. I’m an Anabaptist.”

— Joseph Heller

166. “I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private individuals.”

— Joseph Heller

167. “I see everything twice!”

— Joseph Heller

168. “He had poor eyesight and chronic sinus trouble, which made war especially exciting for him, since he was in no danger of going overseas.”

— Joseph Heller

169. “The smartest people in Washington are the political reporters. They write about their inferiors.”

— Joseph Heller

170. “Chaplain,” he continued, looking up, “we accuse you also of the commission of crimes and infractions we don’t even know about yet. Guilty or innocent?” “I don’t know, sir. How can I say if you don’t tell me what they are?” “How can we tell you if we don’t know?” “Guilty,” decided the colonel. “Sure he’s guilty,” agreed the major. “If they’re his crimes and infractions, he must have committed them.”

— Joseph Heller

171. “Opportunity only knocks once in this world,” he would say. Major Major’s father repeated this good joke at every opportunity.”

— Joseph Heller

172. “I lost my balls! Aarfy, I lost my balls!”

— Joseph Heller

173. “You just came out of the hospital ten days ago,” Milo reminded him reprovingly. “You can’t keep running into the hospital every time something happens you don’t like. No, the best thing to do is fly the missions. It’s our duty.”

— Joseph Heller

174. “Clevinger is a very bright guy, a Harvard man, who knows everything about literature except how to enjoy it.”

— Joseph Heller

175. “Bribery is against the law, and you know it. But it’s not against the law to make a profit, is it? So it can’t be against the law for me to bribe someone in order to make a fair profit, can it? No, of course not!”

— Joseph Heller

176. “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?” “I do,” Dunbar told him. “Why?” Clevinger asked. “What else is there?”

— Joseph Heller

177. “Of course you’re dying. We’re all dying. Where the devil else do you think you’re heading?”

— Joseph Heller

178. “It isn’t even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?”

— Joseph Heller

179. “He could not make them shut-up; they were worse than women. They had not brains enough to be introverted and repressed.”

— Joseph Heller

180. “How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast.”

— Joseph Heller

181. “After he made up his mind to spend the rest of the war in the hospital, Yossarian wrote letters to everyone he knew saying that he was in the hospital but never mentioning why. One day he had a better idea. To everyone he knew he wrote that he was going on a very dangerous mission. “They asked for volunteers. It’s very dangerous, but someone has to do it. I’ll write you the instant I get back.” And he had not written anyone since.”

— Joseph Heller

182. “He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive. The.”

— Joseph Heller

183. “They might have occurred if either General Dreedle or General Peckem had once evinced an interest in taking part in orgies with him, but neither ever did, and the colonel was certainly not going to waste time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him.”

— Joseph Heller

184. “Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise.”

— Joseph Heller

185. “Gold was not altogether certain what, anatomically, a gorge was, but he knew that his was rising.”

— Joseph Heller

186. “Kraft was a skinny, harmless kid from Pennsylvania who wanted only to be liked, and was destined to be disappointed in even so humble and degrading an ambition. Instead, of being liked, he was dead, a bleeding cinder on the barbarous pile whom nobody had heard in those last precious moments while the plane with one wing plummeted.”

— Joseph Heller

187. “Man was matter. Drop him out of 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.”

— Joseph Heller

188. “Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never missed. Yossarian was a lead bombardier who had been demoted because he no longer gave a damn whether he missed or not. He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive.”

— Joseph Heller

189. “And you can’t let crazy people decide whether you’re crazy or not, can you?”

— Joseph Heller

190. “Yossarian attended the education sessions because he wanted to find out why so many people were working so hard to kill him.”

— Joseph Heller

191. “Because he needed a friend so desperately, he never found one.”

— Joseph Heller

192. “The leader of this team of doctors was a dignified, solicitous gentleman who held one finger up directly in front of Yossarian and demanded, “How many fingers do you see?” “Two,” said Yossarian. “How many fingers do you see now?” asked the doctor, holding up two. “Two,” said Yossarian. “And how many now?” asked the doctor, holding up none. “Two,” said Yossarian. The doctor’s face wreathed with a smile. “By Jove, he’s right,” he declared jubilantly. “He does see everything twice.”

— Joseph Heller

193. “It was truly a splendid structure, and Yossarian throbbed with a mighty sense of accomplishment each time he gazed at it and reflected that none of the work that had gone into it was his. There.”

— Joseph Heller

194. “The soldier who saw everything twice nodded weakly and sank back on his bed. Yossarian nodded weakly too, eyeing his talented roommate with great humility and admiration. He knew he was in the presence of a master. His talented roommate was obviously a person to be studied and emulated. During the night, his talented roommate died, and Yossarian decided that he had followed him far enough.”

— Joseph Heller

195. “It’s a real problem to decide whether it’s more boring to do something boring than to pass along everything boring that comes in to somebody else and then have nothing to do at all.”

— Joseph Heller

196. “He coughed quietly, gingerly, and dabbed.”

— Joseph Heller

197. “You’ve got to have a God. Without God, you might turn to something really crazy, like witchcraft, or religion.”

— Joseph Heller

198. “I have some decades to spare. Do you know how long a year takes when it’s going away?”

— Joseph Heller

199. “The spirit gone, man is garbage.”

— Joseph Heller

200. “The only one who lived with the chaplain in his clearing in the woods was Corporal Whitcomb, his assistant. Corporal Whitcomb, an atheist, was a disgruntled subordinate who felt he could do the chaplain’s job much better than the chaplain was doing it and viewed himself, therefore, as an underprivileged victim of social inequity.”

— Joseph Heller