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All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
A man creates a hydrogen bomb for a paranoid Soviet Union, makes sure it will work, and then wins a Nobel Peace Prize! This real-life character, worthy of a story by Kilgore Trout, was the late physicist Andrei Sakharov. He won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his.
Young Booboolings didn’t see any point in developing imaginations anymore, since all they had to do was turn on a switch and see all kinds of jazzy shit. They would look at a printed page or a painting and wonder how anybody could have gotten his or her rocks off looking at things that simple and dead.
“There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.”
“In the beginning there was absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing,” he said. “But nothing implies something, just as up implies down and sweet implies sour, as man implies, woman
MANY of Trout’s stories, except for their unbelievable characters, weren’t science fiction at all. “Dr. Schadenfreude” wasn’t, unless one is humorless enough to regard psychiatry as a science.
When I got home from my war, my uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he bellowed, “You’re a man now!” I damn near hilled my first German.
I SAY IN lectures in 1996 that fifty percent or more of American marriages go bust because most of us no longer have extended families. When you marry somebody now, all you get is one person. I say that when couples fight, it isn’t about money or sex or power. What they’re really saying is, “You’re not enough people!”
He calculates that an average couple with separate places of work logs four man-woman hours each weekday, and sixteen of them on weekends. Being sound asleep with each other doesn’t count. This gives him a standard man-woman week of thirty-six man-woman hours. He multiplies that by fifty-two. This gives him, when rounded off, a standard man-woman year of eighteen hundred man-woman hours. He advertises that any couple that has accumulated this many man-woman hours is entitled to celebrate an anniversary, and to receive flowers and appropriate presents, even if it took them only twenty weeks to
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“Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.”
“Even with military training, there is no way a man can accidentally blow his head off with a shotgun.”
What we have created instead, as customers and employees and investors, is mountains of paper wealth so enormous that a handful of people in charge of them can take millions and billions for themselves without hurting anyone. Apparently. Many members of my generation are disappointed.
Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for.
Should the nation’s wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.
