Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

• Somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places at certain times, without fail.
• There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.
• The trouble with the world was that people were still superstitious instead of scientific. He said if everybody would study science more, there wouldn't be all the trouble there was.
• I think you'll find that everybody does about the same amount of thinking. Scientists simply think about things in one way, and other people think about things in others.
• Any scientist who couldn't explain o an eight-year old what he was doing was a charlatan.
• We'd all do well to start over again, preferably with kindergarten.
• New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
• Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
• Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.
• Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing.
• People taking the last rites have a way of dying on cue.
• I'm grateful for things that work. Not many things do work, you know.
• The truth was that life was as short and brutish and mean as ever.
• My God--life! Who can understand even one little minute of it? "Don't try," he said. "Just pretend you understand."
• Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are.
• People are unkind sometimes without meaning to be.
• I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific.
• It is never a mistake to say goodbye.
• When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.
• Without accurate records of the past, how can men and women be expected to avoid making serious mistakes in the future?
• Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.
• Think of what paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.
• Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

1/29/2012