Kurt Vonnegut

"Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people's blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed.

"Every failure of Earthling leadership has been traceable to a lack on the part of the leader," says Rumfoord, "of at least one of these three things."

The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.

"Look," said Rumfoord, "life for a punctual person is like a roller coaster." He turned to shiver his hands in her face. "All kinds of things are going to happen to you! Sure," he said, "I can see the whole roller coaster you're on. And sure—I could give you a piece of paper that would tell you about every dip and turn, warn you about every bogeyman that was going to pop out at you in the tunnels. But that wouldn't help you any."

"I don't see why not," said Beatrice.

"Because you'd still have to take the roller-coaster ride," said Rumfoord. "I didn't design the roller coaster, I don't own it, and I don't say who rides and who doesn't. I just know what it's shaped like.

When you're dead you're dead.

"I liked him very much," said Constant.

"The insane, on occasion, are not without their charms," said Beatrice.

Rumfoord had known that Constant would try to debase the picture by using it in commerce. Constant's father had done a similar thing when he found he could not buy Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" at any price. The old man had punished Mona Lisa by having her used in an advertising campaign for suppositories. It was the free-enterprise way of handling beauty that threatened to get the upper hand.

"You go up to a man, and you say, 'How are things going, Joe?' And he says, 'Oh fine, fine—couldn't be better.' And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn't be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody's having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much."

He ransacked his memory like a thief going through another man's billfold.

"Thank God!" said Unk.

Redwine raised his eyebrows quizzically. "Why?" he said.

"Pardon me?" said Unk.

"Why thank God?" said Redwine. "He doesn't care what happens to you. He didn't go to any trouble to get you here safe and sound, any more than He would go to the trouble to kill you."

It was a marvelous engine for doing violence to the spirit of thousands of laws without actually running afoul of so much as a city ordinance.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

He was too good a soldier to go around asking questions, trying to round out his knowledge.

A soldier's knowledge wasn't supposed to be round.