«I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.»

«I open up a big cabinet, and I have a collection of helmits. I put on the different helmets, and I take tree bottles of Robitussin and drink them really quickly. Then I set my hands on fire-I have to write whatever comes to mind pretty fast, before my hand burnsoff.I just let whatever comes out, comes out without thinking about it to much. Some of it I keep, some I toss out, some of it I turn into giant cigarettes and somke 'em. I think everybodu should just turn off their TV machines and make up their own songs about whatever comes to mind-their couch, their friends their loaves of bread. Everybody's got their own songs. There should be so many songs out there that it all turns into one big sound and we can put the whole thing into a pickup truck and let it roll off the edge of the Grand Canyon.»

«Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.»

«It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.»

«Big machines are the awe-inspiring cathedrals of the 20th century.»

«Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines»

«As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.»

«I walk the straight lines. I walk through the summer nights. I walk the silver rope of dreams. I walk through dawns of dawns. There?s not a lot that isn?t dying. I see people parading in front of each other like insects in a killing jar, watching each other die. I walk the straight lines throught the Christ machines. Through the eyes of throwaway people. Through the wards and the shores and the cracks in the skulls of the sidewalks. Through love?s howling vacancy. I am the freedom soil. I dig my own grave. I resurrect myself every night. I am all things to myself. I walk the straight lines. I walk the spiders?s jailhouse. I walk the think line, the thin line, the white line and all the line in between. I wish I could trade in my eyes.»

«All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.»

«Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.»