"Insanity is contagious." -Yossarian
"Men. You're American officers. The officers of no other army in the world can make that statement. Think about it." -Colonel Cargill's statement to the enlisted troops
"He had decided to live forever or die in the process." -Yossarian's life philosophy
Clevinger: Well, maybe it's true. 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?
Dunbar: I do.
Clevinger: Why?
Dunbar: What else is there?
"It's a terrible thing when even the word of a licensed physician is suspected by the country he loves." -Doc Daneeka
"You wouldn't believe it Yossarian, but this used to be a pretty good country to live in before they loused it up with their goddam piety." -Doc Daneeka
"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. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
"'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed.
"'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed."
"It made as much sense as anything else, and Yossarian was willing to give Orr the benefit of the doubt because Orr was from the wilderness outside New York City and knew so much more about wild-life than Yossarian did, and because Orr, unlike Yossarian's mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, in-law, teacher, spiritual leader, legislator, neighbor and newspaper, had never lied to him about anything crucial before."
Read Chapter 8. It's freakin' hilarious.
"History did not demand Yossarian's premature demise, justice could not be satisfied without it, progress did not hinge upon it, victory did not depend on it. That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the vicitim of anything but circumstance."
"Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found out. In short, he was a dope. He often looked to Yossarian like one of those people hanging around modern museums with both eyes together on one side of a face. It was an illusion, of course, generated by Clevinger's predilection for staring fixedly at one side of a question and never seeing the other side at all. Politically, he was a humanitarian who did not know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope."
"Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskopf had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times. Such men were dangerous, and even the new cadet officers whom Clevinger had helped into office were eager to give damning testimony against him. The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with."
"The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on . . . And don't you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live." -Yossarian
Yossarian: And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways. There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about- a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatalogical mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?
Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife: Pain? Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us of bodily dangers
Yossarian: And who created dangers? Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of his celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead. Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn't He?
Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife: People would certainly look silly walking around with red neon tubes in the middle of their foreheads
Yossarian: They certainly look beautiful now writhing in agony or stupefied with morphine, don't they? What a colossal, immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering. It's obvious He never met a payroll. Why, no self-respecting businessman would hire a bungler like Him as even a shipping clerk!
Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife: You'd better not talk that way about Him, honey. He might punish you.
Yossarian: Isn't He punishing me enough? You know, we mustn't let Him get away with it. Oh, no, we certainly mustn't let Him get away scot free for all the sorrow He's caused us. Someday I'm going to make Him pay. I know when. On the Judgement Day. Yes, that's the day I'll be close enough to reach out and grab that little yokel by His neck and-
Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife: Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!
Yossarian: What the hell are you getting so upset about? I thought you didn't believe in God.
Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife: I don't. 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.
Yossarian: Let's have a little more religious freedom between us. You don't believe in the God you want to, and I won't believe in the God I want to. Is that a deal?
"Of course you're dying. We're all dying. Where the devil else do you think we're heading?" -Doctor
"In a democracy, the government is the people. We're people, aren't we? So we might just as well keep the money and eliminate the middleman. Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry. If we pay the government everything we owe it, we'll only be encouraging government control and discouraging other individuals from bombing their own men and planes. We'll be taking away their incentive." -Milo Minderbinder
"The government has no business in business, and I would be the last person in the world to ever try to involve the government in a business of mine. But the business of government is business. Calvin Coolidge said that, and Calvin Coolidge was a President, so it must be true." -Milo Minderbinder
"It was already some time since the chaplain had first begun wondering what everything was all about. Was there a God? How could he be sure? Being an Anabaptist minister in the American Army was difficult enough under the best of circumstances; without dogma, it was almost intolerable."
"Doubts of such kind gnawed at the chaplain's lean, suffering frame insatiably. Was there a single true faith, or a life after death? How many angels could dance on the head of a pin, and with what matters did God occupy himself in all the infinite aeons before the Creation? Why was it necessary to put a protective seal on the brow of Cain if there were no other people to protect him from? Did Adam and Eve produce daughters? These were the great, complex questions of ontology that tormented him. Yet they never seemed nearly as crucial to him as the question of kindness and good manners. 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."
"Wintergreen is probably the most influential man in the whole theater of operations. He's not only a mail clerk, but he has access to a mimeograph machine. But he won't help anybody. That's one of the reasons he'll go far." -Yossarian
Psychiatrist Major Sanderson: Just why do you think, that you have such a strong aversion to accepting a cigarette from me?
Yossarian: I put one out a second ago. It's still smoldering in your ash tray.
Sanderson: That's a very ingenious explanation. But I suppose we'll soon discover the truth.
Read the exchange between Yossarian and Pyschiatrist Major Sanderson on pages 303 - 308. Very amusing.
"Now that Yossarian had made up his mind to be brave, he was deathly afraid."
"Women are crazy." -Yossarian
"Death was irreversable, he suspected, and he began to think he was going to lose."
". . . . . . They were four clean-cut kids who were having lots of fun, and they were driving Yossarian nuts. 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 intoverted and repressed."
"There's nothing wrong with greed. It's all that lousy Dr. Stubbs' fault, getting Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn stirred up against flight surgeons. He's going to give the medical profession a bad name by standing up for principle. If he's not careful, he'll be blackballed by his state medical association and kept out of the hospitals." -Doc Daneeka
"The chaplain had sinned, and it was good. Common sense told him that telling lies and defecting from duty were sins. On the other hand, everyone knew that sin was evil and that no good could come from evil. But he did feel good; he felt positively marvelous. Consequently, it followed logically that telling lies and defecting from duty could not be sins. The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his dicovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character."
"Milo had been caught red-handed in the act of plundering his countrymen, and, as a result, his stock had never been higher."
"The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them."
"Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing." -the old woman in Nately's whore's apartment
"Yossarian left money in the old woman's lap- it was odd how many wrongs leaving money seemed to right- and strode out of the apartment, cursing Catch-22 vehemently as he descended the stairs, even though he knew there was no such thing. Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or test to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon, burn up."
". . . because she reminded him of the barefoot boy in the thin shirt and thin, tattered trousers and of all the shivering, stupefying misery in a world that never yet had provided enough heat and food and justice for all but an ingenius and unscrupulous handful. What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked , and how many children were bullied, abused or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landloards would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere."
"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!"
"Mobs . . . mobs of policemen- everything but England was in the hands of mobs, mobs, mobs. Mobs with clubs were in control everywhere."
"I like the way you lie. You'll go far in this world if you ever acquire some decent ambition." -Colonel Korn to Yossarian
"You know Yossarian, I really do admire you a bit. You're an intelligent person of great moral character who has taken a corageous stand. I'm an intelligent person with no moral character at all, so I'm in an ideal position to appreciate it." -Colonel Korn
"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."
"Running away from problems never solved them." -Major Danby
Major Danby: Ideals are good, but people sometimes are not so good. You must try to look up at the big picture.
Yossarian: When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.
Danby: But you must try not to think of that. And you must try not to let it upset you.
Yossarian: Oh, it doesn't really upset me. What does upset me, though, is that they think I'm a sucker. They think that they're smart, and the rest of us are dumb. And, you know, Danby, the thought ocurrs to me right now, for the first time, that maybe they're right.
Danby: You must make decisions. A person can't live like a vegetable.
Yossarian: Why not?
Danby: It must be nice to live like a vegetable.
Yossarian: It's lousy.
Danby: No, it must be very pleasant to be free from all this doubt and pressure. I think I'd like to live as a vegetable and make no important decisions.
Yossarian: What kind of a vegetable, Danby?
Danby: A cucumber or a carrot.
Yossarian: What kind of a cucumber? A good one or a bad one?
Danby: Oh, a good one, of course.
Yossarian: They'd cut you off in your prime and slice you up for a salad.
Danby: A poor one, then.
Yossarian: They'd let you rot and use you for fertilizer to help the good ones grow.
Danby: I guess I don't want to live like a vegetable then.
"There's nothing negative about running away to save my life." -Yossarian
Danby: How do you feel, Yossarian?
Yossarian: Fine. No, I'm very frightened.
Danby: That's good. It proves you're still alive.