Zitat des Tages von Kurt Vonnegut:
If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.
Actually, to be an effective person politically in this country, I think you have to be thirty or over, and also you have to be rich, well-placed, you have to be close to power. And I don't think that young people, because they look young, can do much, as I think they are counterproductive.
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs.
People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.
A chaplain's assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the American Army.
The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.
It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.
To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.
Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.
Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school.
If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milky Way - with a century of transportation whoopee.
People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.
Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.
I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours.
Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read 'Democracy in America' by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.
I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me.
Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do.
I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.
If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.
It is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.
My cash cows, the slick magazines, were put out of business by TV.
It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.
