Kurt Vonnegut

“If there’s something you don’t understand,” urged Dr. Breed, “ask Dr. Horvath to explain it. He’s very good at explaining.” He turned to me. “Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn’t explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.”

“Then I’m dumber than an eight-year-old,” Miss Pefko mourned. “I don’t even know what a charlatan is.”

“You know some people by that name?”

“Yes.”

The name was my last name, too

I was only six years old when they dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, so anything I remember about that day other people have helped me to remember.

That’s what Frank always used to say when people asked him what he thought he was doing. He always said, ‘Experimenting.’

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

talked about phonies. We talked about truth. We talked about gangsters; we talked about business. We talked about the nice poor people who went to the electric chair; and we talked about the rich bastards who didn’t. We talked about religious people who had perversions. We talked about a lot of things.
We got drunk.

She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.

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

I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.

The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!