in nonsense is strength

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives...

Every so often, in the midst of chaos, you come across an amazing, inexplicable instance of civic responsibility. Maybe the last shred of faith people have is in their firemen.

So it goes.

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the universe.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDEDFOR THE EXISTENCE OF GODWAS MUSIC

I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. “Oh, well — he wasn’t going to write the Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony anyway.

So what indeed! The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren’t...

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...

Maybe I did hurt him, but I don’t think I could have hurt him much. He was one of the best-protected human beings who ever lives. People couldn’t get at him because he just wasn’t...

Vanity rather than wisdom determines how the world is run.

In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in his cosmic loneliness.And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.”...

Title: What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years? Only verse: Nothing.

I have no doubt that they’ll tell you a lot of kind things about me when my back is turned. They may not have been behind the door when God passed out the pretty faces,...

As I spoke of another’s love and looked into the wide, blue windows of her soul, a rich, insistent yearning flooded my senses.–“Tango

Sometimes Alton Darwin would talk to me about the planet he was on before he was transported in a steel box to Athena. ‘Drugs were food,’ he said. ‘I was in the food business. Just...

Skyscraper National Park

I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.

Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.

I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I...

I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I...

By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle.

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...

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

I have had some experiences with love, or think I have, anyway, although the ones I have liked best could easily be described as “common decency”. I treated somebody well for a little while, or...

I know damn well they will be. The people down there are poorenough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have somecommon sense!

People talk a lot about all the homosexuals there are to see in Greenwich Village, but it was all the neuters that caught my eye that day. These were my people — as used as...

I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian]

I wish you’d help me look into a more interesting problem – namely, my sanity.

It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can’t get out of, but I think this is very usual in life. There is the implication that if you just...

We would have said the Nazis were evil in any event, since we had decided to fight them. This has always been the style in war, until very recently…in order that we can be frenzied...

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to...

On the eighth day, the forty-year-old hobo said to Billy: “This ain’t bad. I can be comfortable anywhere.””You can?” said Billy.On the ninth day the hobo died. So it goes. His last words were: “You...

There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.The visitor from outer space made a gift to the Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody,...

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...

Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her...

The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It’s misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my...

As for children’s working off aggressions, I’m against it. They are going to need all the aggressions they can contain for ultimate release in the adult world. Name one great man in history who did...

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...

I don’t think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they’re talking about the secrets they’ve been told or haven’t been told. They’re talking about...

You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.

But doing that job, surviving it, was like getting a Purple Heart. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

Suicide is the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers

This is a beguiling book,

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

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies heonly appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people tocry...

I learned the joke at the core of American self-improvement: knowledge was so much junk to be processed one way or another at great universities. The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong...