Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

A society, on occasion, can be the worst possible describer of mental health.

It appeared to the Elders that the people here would believe anything about themselves, no matter how preposterous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings' heads that the whole Universe had been created by one big animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot of less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives of the Creator.The people down here just ate that up!

I will say further, as an officer of an enormous international conglomerate, that nobody who is doing well in this economy ever even wonders waht is really going on.We are chimpanzees. We are orangutans.

How nice-to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference.

Somebody will beat both [contents and price] sooner or later because that is good old Free Enterprise, where the consumer benefits from battles between jolly green giants.

Don't forget to wind the restricted clock and put the confidential cat out.

Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns.

Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it--love yourself

He had had no experience in asking for a job with a big organization, and Mr. Dilling was making him aware of what a fine art it was--if you couldn't run a machine. A duel was under way.

I agree with Kilgore Trout about realistic novels and their accumulations of nit-picking details. In Trout__ novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back. The librarian asks him why he doesn__ like it, and he says to her, __ already know about human beings.

I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of the Perpetual Astonishment

I can think of another quickie education for a child, which, in its way, is almost as salutary: Meeting a human being who is tremendously respected by the adult world, and realizing that that person is actually a malicious lunatic.

Yes, and our sister's sons are candid now about a creepy business which used to worry them a lot: They cannot find their mother or their father in their memories anywhere - not anywhere. The goat farmer, whose name is James Carmalt Adams, Jr., said this about it to me, tapping his forehead with his fingertips: "It isn't the museum, it should be." The museums in children's minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror - to protect the children from eternal grief.

She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].

It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don't damage children much. They didn't damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

If you go back through history, you__l 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.

Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did.