I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

Well, to admire the hell out of Jesus Christ or of everyone who speaks well. And, well my grandfather said is– if– what Jesus said was marvelous. What does it matter whether he was God...

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

Perhaps some people really are born unhappy. I surely hope not. Speaking for my sister and myself: We were born with the capacity and determination to be utterly happy all the time. Perhaps even in...

Trzymajcie się z dala od człowieka, który pracował w pocie czoła nad rozwiązaniem jakiejś zagadki, rozwiązał ją i stwierdził, że nie jest mądrzejszy niż przedtem – powiada Bokonon. – Przepełnia go bowiem mordercza pogarda do...

If you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington, D.C. I know a couple of bright seventh graders who would not be welcome in Washington D.C.

Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who’ll get one.

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

There was a photograph of Trout. He was an old man with a full black beard. He looked like a frightened, aging Jesus, whose sentence to crucifixion had been commuted to imprisonment for life.

Oh, a sleeping drunkard Up in Central Park, And a lion-hunter In the jungle dark, And a Chinese dentist,And a British queen–All fit togetherIn the same machine.Nice, nice, very nice;Nice, nice, very nice; Nice, nice,...

Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.

How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

Tis better to have love and lustThan to let our apparatus rust.

As the new Adam, it might be said, his final act was to cast the Apple of Knowledge into the deep blue sea.

Unexpected travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God

Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God.

Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

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.

Painters–and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!

E qualsiasi sogno di aiutare la nostra gente rischia di essere parimenti un ermafrodito travestito se non si prepara un progetto per darci tutto il conforto e la compagnia delle famiglie allargate, all’interno delle quali...

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

Make me young, make me young, make me young!

And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

And so it goes…

Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning...

I used to be funny, and perhaps I’m not anymore. It may be that I have become rather grumpy because I’ve seen so many things that have offended me that I cannot deal with in...

It’s a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life.

It was a thunderingly beautiful experience — voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.

Americans… are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.

Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are.

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting...

American planes full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards sucked bullets and shell fragments from...

Mister, when I see my first lady angel, if God ever sees fit to show me one, it’ll be her wings not her face that’ll make my mouth fall open. I’ve already seen the prettiest...

A winded, defeated-looking fat woman in filthy coveralls trudged beside us, hearing what Miss Pefko said. She turned to examine Dr. Breed, looking at him with helpless reproach. She hated people who thought too much....

The museums in children’s minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror—to protect the children from eternal grief.For my own part, though: It would have been catastrophe if I had forgotten my...

She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrased and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going,...

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

He gave me the key, which I later discovered would open practically every door in the hotel. I thanked him, and I made a small mistake we irony collectors often make: I tried to share...

High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other...

and I’m whistling as beautifully as I can.

I suggest that you work for a socialist form of government. Free Enterprise is much too hard on the old and the sick and the shy and the poor and the stupid, and on the...