Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: "Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity. "The ideas Earthlings held didn't matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn't do much about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything."They even had a saying about the futility of ideas: 'If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.' "And then Earthlings discovered tools. Suddenly agreeing with friends could be a form of suicide or worse. But agreements went on, not for the sake of common sense or decency or self-preservation, but for friendliness."Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead. And even when they built computers to do some thinking for them, they designed them not so much for wisdom as for friendliness. So they were doomed. Homicidal beggars could ride.”

“Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?”

“Be aware of this truth that the people on this earth could be joyous, if only they would live rationally and if they would contribute mutually to each others' welfare.This world is not a vale of sorrows if you will recognize discriminatingly what is truly excellent in it; and if you will avail yourself of it for mutual happiness and well-being. Therefore, let us explain as often as possible, and particularly at the departure of life, that we base our faith on firm foundations, on Truth for putting into action our ideas which do not depend on fables and ideas which Science has long ago proven to be false.”

“When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, "You think your dad's a good chemist? They're turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?”

“If you go back through history, you’ll find that the people who have been most eager to rule, to make the laws, to enforce the laws and to tell everybody exactly how God Almighty wants things here on Earth— those people have forgiven themselves and their friends for any-thing and everything. But they have been absolutely disgusted and terrified by the natural sexuality of common men and women.”

“I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can't live without a culture anymore.”

“what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations”

“Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.”

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

“The reason creatures wanted to use language instead of mental telepathy was that they found out they could get so much more done with language. Language made them so much more active. Mental telepathy, with everybody constantly telling everybody everything, produced a sort of generalized indifference to all information. But language, with its slow, narrow meanings, made it possible to think about one thing at a time -- to start thinking in terms of projects.”

“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.”

“There were lots of things to stop and see - and then it was time to go, always time to go.”

“This has been my greatest challenge: because the current reality now seems so unreal, it's hard to make nonfiction seem believable. But you, my friend [Michael Moore], are able to do that.”

“Whenever I ask a question, and the pain comes, I know I have asked a really good question.”

“Your planet's immune system is trying to get rid of you.”

“That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old time big brains. They would tell their owners, in effect, 'Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course, it's just fun to think about.'And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it-have slaves fight each other to the death in the Colosseum, or burn people to death in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in indistrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on.”

“The row was actually about everything in creation, but it had for its subject of the moment the boy's mustache.”

“That's what is was to be young — to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do.”

“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

“And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It's good for you.”