Too many of us treat guns with genial familiarity. Guns should give us the heebie-jeebies. They are killing machines. That is all they are. We should dread them the way we dread cancer and cyanide and electric chairs.
I do realize that I am a very slow realizer.
Now, if others will rid the earth of vanity, ignorance, and want, mankind can live happily ever after.
Everything is going to be unimaginably worse and is never going to get any better.
I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.
Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.
Whatever we've said, friends, we're saying still-- such as it was, such as it is, such as it will be.
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.
Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me.
I call TVs 'erasers' because they have not only wiped away the entire human experience to date, but whatever it was they were wetting their pants about only fifteen minutes earlier.
Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns.
When machines start delivering themselves, I said, I guess that’s when the people better start really worrying.
See the cat? See the cradle?
No trouble. There really isn't a heck of a lot to the job.
The heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality and the heartbreaking impossibilty of lying about it.
The male ghost looked God-awful old and starved and moth-eaten. The female ghost looked young enough to be his daughter, sleek, bouncy, and full of hell.
I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.
I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.
When everything was beautiful and nothing hurt...
All this responsibility at such an early age made her a bitchy flibbertigibbet.
Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science, was bored stiff by technical details.
And what is literature, Rabo," he said, "but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'.
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact how hard money is to come by, and, there, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves.
You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them.
My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die.
If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine.
It is never a mistake to say good-bye.
Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.
Like roses and mustard gas.
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. . . .
This has been my greatest challenge: because the current reality now seems so unreal, it's hard to make nonfiction seem believable. But you, my friend [Michael Moore], are able to do that.
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
We are what we imagine ourselves to be.
That sure is a beautiful picture, she said. Looks just like heaven or something. Or something, said the painter.
My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.
It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again.
So New Yorkers, who had so many nameless terrors, were easily taught to fear something seemingly specific—The Pluto Gang.
There is a planet in the Solar System where the people are so stupid they didn't catch on for a million years that there was another half to their planet.
Belief is nearly the whole of the universe whether based on truth or not.
The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn't see those causes at all, or even imagine them.
Life is nothing but high school.
All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies. My.
The armed forces knew he was a homosexual, that he was certain to fall in love with other fighting men, and the armed forces didn't want to put up with such love affairs.
I may not know what love is, he said, but, by God, at least I've never gotten drunk by myself.
Not slaves, said Halyard, chuckling patronizingly. Citizens, employed by government.
Soft citizens of the American democracy learned to kick a man below the belt and make the bastard scream.
My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat fur.
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.
