Cat's Cradle

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are 'It might have been.'

“Maturity,” Bokonon tells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”

A pissant is somebody who thinks he’s so damn smart, he never can keep his mouth shut. No matter what anybody says, he’s got to argue with it. You say you like something, and, by God, he’ll tell you why you’re wrong to like it. A pissant does his best to make you feel like a boob all the time. No matter what you say, he knows better.

I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?"It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.This is it:"Nothing."

I am about to do a very un-ambassadorial thing ... I am about to tell you what I really feel. ... We are gathered here, friends ... to honor [the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy], children dead, all dead, all murdered in war. It is customary on days like this to call such lost children men. I am unable to call them men for this simple reason: that in the same war in which [the Martyrs] died, my own son died. My soul insists that I mourn not a man but a child.I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays.But they are murdered children all same.And I propose to you that if we are to pay our sincere respects to the hundred lost children of San Lorenzo, that we might best spend the day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind.Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns. ... [I]f today is really in honor of a hundred children murdered in war ... is today a day for a thrilling show? The answer is yes, on one condition: that we, the celebrants, are working consciously and tirelessly to reduce the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind.

“Well, when it became evident that no governmental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.

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.

And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely."Everything must have a purpose?” asked God."Certainly," said man."Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.And He went away.

God never wrote a good play in His life.

It was the belief of Bokonon that good societies could be built only by pitting good against evil, and by keeping tension between the two high at all times.

Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing.

"I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.""Nice going, God!""Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have.""I feel very unimportant compared to You.""The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around."

I agree with one Bokononist idea. I agree that all religions, including Bokononism, are nothing but lies.

... I was very upset about how Americans couldn’t imagine what it was like to be something else, to be something else and proud of it.

Science is magic that works.

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.

The brainless serenity of charwomen and janitors working late at night came over us. In a messy world we were at least making our little corner clean.

“He always said he would never take his own advice, because he knew it was worthless.”

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

He had made me feel as though my own free will were as irrelevant as the free will of a piggy-wig arriving at the Chicago stockyards.

“History,” writes Bokonon. “Read it and weep!”

"My God — life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?""Don't try," [Castle] said. "Just pretend you understand."

My second wife had left me on the grounds that I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with.

He reported his avocation as: "Being alive."He reported his principal occupation as: "Being dead."

[Hazel Crosby's] obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows - and any nation, anytime, anywhere.As Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:If you wish to study a granfalloon

Just remove the skin of a toy balloon.

"The highest possible form of treason," said [Horlick] Minton, "is to say that Americans aren't loved wherever they go, whatever they do. Claire tried to make the point that American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love.""I guess Americans are hated a lot of places.""People are hated a lot of places. Claire pointed out ... that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty. But the loyalty board didn't pay any attention to that. All they knew was that Claire and I both felt that Americans were unloved."

I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific.

“Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.”

"If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who."

Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s really going on.

She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.The fat woman’s expression implied that she would go crazy on the spot if anybody did any more thinking.

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 secrets they've been told or haven't been told. They're talking about intimate things, family things, love things ... Dr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren't the main things with him. ... Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth. ... I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.

Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.

We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon ... "If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass." At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, "Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass." By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries. It is as free form as an amoeba.

"What is the secret of life?" I asked."I forget," said Sandra."Protein," the bartender declared. "They found out something about protein.""Yeah," said Sandra, "that's it."

"Ah, God," says Bokonon, "what an ugly city every city is."

Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;

Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'

Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;

Man got to tell himself he understand.

"It’s a small world," I observed."When you put it in a cemetery, it is."

[Dr. Asa Breed] said, the trouble with the world was... that people were still superstitious instead of scientific. He said that if everybody would study science more, there wouldn’t be all the trouble there was.

Peculiar Travel Suggestions are Dancing Lessons From God.

Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end,

And our God will take things back that He to us did lend.

And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,

Why go right ahead and scold Him. He'll just smile and nod.

All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies.

There are lots of good anecdotes about the bomb and Father ... For instance, do you know the story about Father on the day they first tested a bomb out at Alamagordo? After the things went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?'

Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you now because I never stopped dawdling like an eight-year-old on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn. I am a very happy man. Thank you.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.So be it.

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

Nothing in this book is true."Live by the foma* that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy." — The Books of Bokonon 1:5*Harmless untruths