Sucker's Portfolio

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

He could not see that time — not cancer or heart disease or any other disease in his books — was the most frightening, crippling plague of mankind.

Drinking was a physical necessity for those who weren’t born numb.

“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime,” said Balzac, alluding to European aristocrats who imagined themselves to be descended from anything other than sociopaths.

I have to wonder if obedience isn’t the basic flaw in most of humankind.

So the wake of North American TV is something like the wake of a bulldozer, in which everything has been made nice and neat, dead level and lifeless and featureless. But a better analogue of TV’s wake in the space-time continuum is a black hole into which even the greatest crimes and stupidities, and indeed whole continents, if need be, can be made to disappear from our consciousness.