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Every act of war, every act of violence, even by a paranoid schizophrenic, celebrates Hammurabi and shows contempt for Jesus Christ.
Don’t give up on books. They feel so good—their friendly heft. The sweet reluctance of their pages when you turn them with your sensitive fingertips.
When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”
Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. I myself have experienced that intoxication. I was once a Corporal.
We Humanists behave as honorably as we can without any expectations of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community. We had a memorial service for Asimov a while back, and at one point I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of Humanists. I rolled them in the aisles.
If I should ever die, again God forbid, I hope some of you will say, “Kurt’s up in Heaven now.” That’s my favorite joke.
You know what else I think? I think life is no way to treat an animal, and not just people, but pigs and chickens, too. Life just hurts too much.
We might have psychiatrists examine all the candidates. But who but a nutcase would want to be a psychiatrist? But, when you stop to think about it, only a nutcase would want to be a human being, if he or she had a choice.
The French Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, wrote that “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” So there’s another barrel of laughs from literature. Camus himself died in an automobile accident.
The leadership of both the Ghost Dance and the Cubist movement had these elements in common: A charismatic, gifted leader who described cultural changes which should be made; Two or more respected citizens who testified that this leader was not a lunatic, but was well worth listening to; A glib, personable explainer, who told the general public what the leader was up to, why he was so wonderful, and so on, day after day. Turns out that such a table of organization worked pretty well for Adolf Hitler, too, and maybe for Robert Maynard Hutchins, when he turned this place inside out and upside
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Dostoyevsky suggested that one sacred memory from childhood was perhaps the best education.
Also they are not respectful of the Constitution of the United States of America, the most exuberant work of art in the history of this planet.
Let us face it: an Earthling’s sense of humor and fascination with sex makes it impossible for him or her to concentrate seriously on anything, even his or her survival, for more than an hour at a time.
When I graduated from high school, the speaker told us about the great adventures we could have in science—especially in plastics and polarized light. I wound up in the infantry instead. Almost everybody did.
My ironic distance as a novelist has a lot to do with having been an anthropology student. Anthropology made me a cultural relativist, which is what everybody ought to be. People in the world over ought to be taught, seriously, that culture is a gadget, and that one culture is as arbitrary as another.
My paternal grandfather and father were both architects, restructuring the reality of Indianapolis with meticulously measured quantities of materials whose presence—unlike that of a conventional God Almighty—could not be doubted: wood and steel, sand and lime and stone, copper, brass, bricks.
“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
“When things go well for days on end, it is a hilarious accident.”
“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”
