Catch-22 Quotes

You can and you can't You will and you won't You'll be damned if you do You'll be damned if you don't

In human affairs the solution to every problem contains within it the seeds of a new problem.

We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22. 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 and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.

Every solution breeds new problems.

It I talked about Watergate, I was described as struggling to free myself from the morass. If I did not talk about Watergate, I was accused of being out of touch with reality.

Why do I need I.D. to get I.D.? If I had I.D. I wouldn't need I.D.

I got my transferrable skills from working at entry-level, gauging what I wanted from my career, and making sure I had what it took to get the one I truly wanted. But now there's a Catch 22: school leavers need experience to get jobs, but they can't get experience without jobs.

Drama if I sing, drama if I don't sing. What do you do?

Don't get me wrong. I don't take anything for granted. But it seems like the better I play, the more attention I get. And I can't get away from it. You play great, you get attention. But I hate attention. It is weird. I'm in a bind. The more you win, the more they come.

'Catch-22''s first readers were largely of the generation that went through World War II. For them, it provided a startlingly fresh take, a much-needed, much-delayed laugh at the terror and madness they endured.

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.

Irony became the head that bit its tail and then there is no way out.

You can't get a job without experience and you can't get experience until you have a job. Once you solve that problem you are home free.

[Referring to the Democrats:] They can't get elected unless things get worse, and things won't get worse unless they get elected.

I'm in a Catch-22. If I don't go after a ball, I'm lazy, I'm not giving it 100 percent. If I do dive for the ball - which I did, and blew out my shoulder - it's, Why did I play it so hard?

It's kind of a catch-22 now because since the 'Da Vinci Code,' I have access to places and people that I didn't have access to before, so that's a lot of fun for somebody like me, but I'm always trying to keep a secret. I don't want people to know what I'm writing about.

Thanks to welfare's Catch-22, families receiving benefits cannot save for the future.

The worse I do the more popular I get.

predicament, n. The wage of consistency.

Everything in life is a double-edged sword.

That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed. It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

I always used to say when I was on television that I prefer to be on stage and when on stage I prefer to do television. Typical human condition.

There is the old catch-22 line that a mentally unstable person can't know, as per their illness, that they are unstable. But that was wrong. You can and do have the insight to see your own crazy.

You cannot be happy with your family while being personally unhappy with your work. It's a Catch-22 kind of thing.