Kurt Vonnegut

Hello, babies.  Welcome to Earth.  It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter.  It's wet and round and crowded.  At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here.  There's only one rule that I know of, babies -- 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'

Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow - whether there is a market for it or not! The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don't show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward.

A first grader should understand that her or his culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society...Cultural relativity is defensible, attractive. It’s a source of hope. It means we don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it.

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.

It took us so long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial.  And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on.

I said good bye to me friend, hung up the phone, sat down and wrote this epitaph: "The good Earth - we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy

Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable.

Music makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it.