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"It's a widely accepted principle," he says, "that you can claim a piece of land which has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, if only you will repeat this mantra endlessly: ‘We discovered it, we discovered it, we discovered it. . . .’" Deadeye Dick (1982)

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“. . . The economy is a thoughtless weather system — and nothing more. Some joke on the people, to give them such a thing.” Jailbird (1979)

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"Thank God you're still alive! Thank God there's somebody still alive who cares what happens to this country. I thought maybe I was the last one. I've wandered this city for years now, Walter, saying to myself, ‘They've all died off, the ones who cared?’ And then there you were.” Jailbird (1979)

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“. . .But then he let advertisers know that his robots would also endorse automobiles or beer or razors or wristwatches or perfume or whatever. He made a fortune, according to my father, because so many sports enthusiasts wanted to be exactly like those robots.” Galápagos (1985)

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"Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies." Cat’s Cradle (1963)

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“There I was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic TV, with virtually no health services for the poor. Where to go? What to do?” (HP 1990)

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He knew I could draw, so he found it odd that I wouldn't want to go on and on about the looks of things. "To anybody who can draw," I said, "the idea of putting the appearance of anything into words is like trying to make a Thanksgiving dinner out of ball bearings and broken glass." Bluebeard 1987

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He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: ‘Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected.’ So it goes.

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“HARMONIUM-The only known form of life on the planet Mercury. The harmonium is a cave-dweller. A more gracious creature would be hard to imagine.” The Sirens of Titan (1959)

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“Football was a war game. Two opposing teams fought over the ball while wearing armor made out of leather and cloth and plastic.”

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“I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.”

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“We were innocently exposing ourselves to a master seducer against whose blandishments we were defenseless. It was too late for either of us to turn back by the time we realized how deeply embroiled we had let ourselves become. Want to guess who or what it was? It was the Museum of Modern Art.”

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"Shake hands with the laughingstock of Midland City, and the laughingstock of Venice, Italy, and the laughingstock of Madrid, Spain, and the laughingstock of Vancouver, British Columbia, and the laughingstock of Cairo, Egypt, and of just about every important city you can name." Deadeye Dick (1982)

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“. . .I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.” Jailbird (1979)

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“Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the Universe has been to us unknowable so far. We serve as well as we can the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.” Timequake

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"You're certainly candid." "I'm also rich." "Glad to hear it." "If you want an expert opinion, money doesn't necessarily make people happy." "Thanks for the information. You've just saved me a lot of trouble. I was just about to make some money." Cat’s Cradle (1963)

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“Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.”

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“A real rattlesnake looked like this: The Creator of the Universe had put a rattle on its tail. The Creator had also given it front teeth which were hypodermic syringes filled with deadly poison. Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe.”

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“. . . those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.” Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

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‘All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.’ ‘You sound to me as though you don't believe in free will,’ said Billy Pilgrim. S5 (1969)

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“It wasn't that Helga and I were crazy about Nazis. I can't say, on the other hand, that we hated them. They were a big enthusiastic part of our audience, important people in the society in which we lived. They were people. Only in retrospect can I think of them as trailing slime behind.” MN (1961)

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"I reminded her of the cook's daughter's habit of referring to anybody she didn't like for whatever reason as "an asshole." I said: ‘Never did I hear Celeste give a thoughtful explanation of what it was that such a person might have done to earn that proctological sobriquet.'” Bluebeard (1987)

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“I spoke of American loneliness. It was the only subject I needed for victory, which was lucky. It was the only subject I had. . . I said that all the damaging excesses of Americans in the past were motivated by loneliness rather than a fondness for sin.” Slapstick (1976)

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"You were a damn good President, Brother Billy," somebody called from the back of the room. "I would have liked to give my country peace as well as brotherhood and sisterhood," I went on. "There is no peace, I'm sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.” Slapstick

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"No more apologies! So we're poor! All right, we're poor! This is America! And America is one place in this sorry world where people shouldn't have to apologize for being poor. The question in America should be, 'Is this guy a good citizen? Is he honest? Does he pull his own weight?'" GBYMR (1965)

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"You see in me a man who was flattered and lied to and coddled out of his proper destiny, which was a life in business, in rendering some sort of plodding but useful service to his community. Don't throw away your destiny the way I did. Be what you were born to be. Be a pharmacist!" (Deadeye Dick)

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About a month before, the Chinese had sent two hundred explorers to Mars—without using a space vehicle of any kind. Mother said that it seemed like such a long time since Americans had discovered anything. "All of a sudden," she said, "everything is being discovered by the Chinese." (Slapstick)

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“This was in a country where everybody was expected to pay his own bills for everything, and one of the most expensive things a person could do was get sick. Patty Keene's father's sickness cost ten times as much as all the trips to Hawaii Dwayne was going to give away at the end of Hawaiian Week.”

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“A geek, of course, is a man who lies in a cage on a bed of filthy straw in a carnival freak-show and bites the heads off live chickens and makes subhuman noises, and is billed as having been raised by wild animals in the jungles of Borneo.” Jailbird (1979)

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“To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life. I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in.“ Deadeye Dick (1982)

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Persons with anything life sustaining to sell, fellow citizens as well as foreigners, were refusing to exchange their goods for money. They were suddenly saying to people with nothing but paper representations of wealth, "Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think paper was so valuable?" (1/2)

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I argued that it was a teacher's duty to speak frankly to students of college age about all sorts of concerns of humankind, not just the subject of a course as stated in the catalogue. (1/2) Hocus Pocus (1980)

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"We'd been apart so long—I'd been dead so long," she said in English. "I thought surely you'd built a new life, with no room in it for me. I'd hoped that." "My life is nothing but room for you," I said. "It could never be filled by anyone but you.” Mother Night (1961)

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“There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)

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"The Money River, where the wealth of the nation flows. We were born on the banks of it—and so were most of the mediocre people we grew up with, went to private schools with, sailed and played tennis with. We can slurp from that mighty river to our hearts' content." God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater 1965

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“Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.” Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

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“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” Bagombo Snuff Box (1999)

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“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.” A Man Without a Country (2005)

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"We simply did not realize," Eliza said, "that anybody wanted us to be intelligent." "With your cooperation," I said, "we will make this mansion famous for intelligence as it has been infamous for idiocy in days gone by. Let the fences come down.” Slapstick (1976)

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“. . . human brains back then had become such copious and irresponsible generators of suggestions as to what might be done with life, that they made acting for the benefit of future generations seem one of many arbitrary games which might be played by narrow enthusiasts . . . (1/2)

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“. . . This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?” Bluebeard (1987)

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“The minds of children in intellectually humble American homes back then weren't swamped with countless stories from TV sets. They heard or read only a few stories, and so could remember them, and maybe learn something from them.” Timequake (1997)

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"The machines," said Paul, "have exceeded the personal sovereignty willingly surrendered to them by the American people for good government. Machines and organization and pursuit of efficiency have robbed the American people of liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Player Piano (1952)

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“Unlike my Socialist grandfather Ben Wills, who was a nobody, I have no reforms to propose. I think any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever the people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.” Hocus Pocus (1990)

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"And who renders the final decision on that?" he said. "God?" I said. "I mean here on Earth," he said. "I don't know," I said. "Painters-and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians," he said. "They are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil. . .” Bluebeard (1987)

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“He was used to ingratitude. One of his favorite Kilgore Trout books dealt with ingratitude and nothing else. It was called, ‘The First District Court of Thankyou,’ which was a court you could take people to, if you felt they hadn't been properly grateful for something you had done.” (1/2)

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