You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!

Insanity is contagious.

[They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.

I don't think it's good to achieve too much at too early an age. What else can the future give you if you've already got all that your imagination has dreamt up for you? A writer is only discovered once in a lifetime, and if it happens very early the impossibility of matching that moment again can have a somewhat corrosive effect on his personality and indeed on the work itself.

As always occurred when he quarreled over principles in which he believed passionately, he would end up gasping furiously for air and blinking back bitter tears of conviction. There were many principles in which Clevinger believed passionately. He was crazy.

He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

"What would they do to me," he asked in confidential tones, "if I refused to fly them?" "We'd probably shoot you," ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen replied. "We?" Yossarian cried in surprise. "What do you mean, we? Since when are you on their side?" "If you're going to be shot, whose side do you expect me to be on?" ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen retorted.