Richard Bach Quotes

The world is ashamed of being virtuous.

It's nice to wear a suit once in a while. It can restrict some body movement, but it makes me feel as though I'm part of society. I feel a sense of security because I've conformed to the standards of the rest of the world.

We do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all.

This thing in society that you have to be a stick will always be in my mind, but that's just something I have to deal with.

But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying.

To be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.

Because a women's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.

No, it's not that they're bad. It's that they're obliged to pretend they're good. They've been brought up to deceive and be cunning, to protect themselves from our society. I don't want to be like that.

I've seen so many people in my life struggle tremendously to fit into those boxes or to live up to those expectations or pressures put upon them by whatever society's concept of 'normal' is. I get frustrated by rules and regulations. I'm frustrated by things that are exclusive to one particular life choice.

Everything you think you're supposed to feel even, or do. When it doesn't match up with what everything that the culture is telling you to do, you feel like a failure.

What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it—like a secret vice!

I hate a woman who offers herself because she ought to do so, and cold and dry thinks of her sewing when making love.

Men and the world are mutually toxic to each other.

A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.

I feel like it's a subversive thing [a certain body type to admire] which keeps women preoccupied with something that doesn't matter, and takes up a lot of space, and prevents people from what they're meant to be doing.

Some days you just want to get dressed and go about your business. But if you're a woman, you can't, because there is no unmarked woman.

Being good felt like a heavy coat, so I took it off.

Each man is contained and constrained, on entering social life, to fit his own life in, just as he fits his words and thoughts into a language that was formed without and before him and which is impervious to his power. Entering the game, as it were, whether of belonging to a nation or of using a language, a man enters arrangements which it does not fall to him to determine, but only to learn and respect the rules.

Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condition. Of that I am firmly persuaded. He is made and constructed to that very end. And not only at the present time owing to some casual circumstance, but always, at all times, a decent man is bound to be a coward and a slave.

Society demands conformity at the expense of individual liberty. Let us be for once a non conformist to be fully alive.

Please! Don't all leave. Somebody has to do it, don't you see? Somebody has to save the world.

When majority is insane, sane must go to asylum.

Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it.

Dammit Sir, it's your duty to get married. You can't always be living for pleasure!