"If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Hocus Pocus)

"He was talking about the sign that said 'THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.'
'All knew was that I didn't want my daughter or anybody's child to see a message that negative every time she comes into the library,' he said. 'And then I found out it was you who was responsible for it.'
'What's so negative about it?' I said.
'What could be a more negative word than "futility"?' he said.
'"Ignorance,"' I said."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Hocus Pocus)

"The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat."
— Confucius

"I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved."
— Søren Kierkegaard

"Man makes plans . . . and God laughs."
— Michael Chabon

"...we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE"
— Kurt Vonnegut (Hocus Pocus)

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity."
— William Butler Yeats

"How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is."
— Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front)

"(He) mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute"
— Bruce Sterling (Schismatrix)