And if that wasn’t funny, there were lots of things that weren’t even funnier.
[The doctor] was a very neat, clean man whose idea of a good time was to sulk.
Fortunately, just when things were blackest, the war broke out.
The case against [him] was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with.
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.
I don’t [believe in God]. 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.
Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.
He had lived for almost twenty years without trauma, tension, hate, or neurosis, which was proof to [him] of just how crazy he really was.
She was irresistible, and men edged away from her carefully.
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, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements?
The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.
He was a perceptive, graceful, sophisticated man who was sensitive to everyone’s weakness but his own and found everyone absurd but himself.
You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions.
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!
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.
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 he 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, 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.
