Ken Kesey Quotes

If you don't watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.

No one's ever dared come out and say it before, but there's not a man among us that doesn't think it, that doesn't feel just as you do about her and the whole business - feel it somewhere down deep in his scared little soul.

I will be a sonofabitch if he ain't in here at eleven-thirty at night, fartin' around in the dark with a pair of scissors and a paper sack.

A man has to know he had a choice before he can enjoy what he chose. I know now. That a human has to make it with other humans . . . before he can make it with himself.

"But I tried though," he says. "Goddammit, I sure as hell did that much, now, didn't I?"

It’s still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.

You can't trust the quality any more...

They wouldn't be so cocky if they knew what me and the moon have going.

"I discovered at an early age that I was - shall we be kind and say different? It's a better, more general word than the other one... I got sick... It was the feeling that the great, deadly pointing forefinger of society was pointing at me - and the great voice of millions chanting, "Shame. Shame. Shame." It's society's way of dealing with someone different."

When I see bad-looking bikers with black leather studs on their wrists hanging out at the Oregon Country Fair, I take it as a sign of health. No, I don’t want them hanging around, but trying to eliminate them all, arrest them all, legislate against them all — that’s evil. I have asked feminists, If you could, would you eliminate all male chauvinist pigs? If you could come up with some kind of spray to spray in the air and do away with them, would you? Would you do away with all scorpions and rattlesnakes, mosquitoes? Mosquitoes are part of the ecosystem. So are male chauvinist pigs. You’ve got to fight them, but you don’t try to exterminate them. A purifying group or system that would eliminate them all — that would be an evil force. Anytime you have a force that comes along and says, We will eradicate these people, you have evil. Looking back in history, what has seemed the worst turns out not to be the worst.'''

Later, hiding in the latrine from the black boys, I'd take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.

"The way I remember it the tribe got paid some huge amount."
"That's what they said to him. He said, What can you pay for the way a man lives? He said, What can you pay for the way a man is? They didn't understand."

People don't want other people to get high, because if you get high, you might see the falsity of the fabric of the society we live in.

I'd think, maybe he truly is something extraordinary. He's what he is, that's it. Maybe that makes him strong enough, being what he is.

Society is what decides who's sane and who isn't, so you got to measure up.