If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: The Graduation Speeches and Other Words to Live By

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

had written that “The function of the artist is to make people like life better than before,” and when asked if he’d ever seen that done he answered, “Yes, the Beatles did it.”

“…we are not members of different generations, as unlike, as some people would have us believe, as Eskimos and Australian Aborigines. We are all so close to each other in time that we should think of ourselves as brothers and sisters. … Whenever my children complain about the planet to me, I say ‘Shut up! I just got here myself.’” (Vonnegut had three children of his own, and adopted four others, including his last child, Lily, with second wife Jill Krementz.)

“I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have had so far. Perhaps we will get another good idea by and by—and then we will have two good ideas.”

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke,

I am being so silly because I pity you so much. I pity all of us so much. Life is going to be very tough again, just as soon as this is over.

I suggest to you that the withholding of a puberty ceremony from young males in our society is a scheme, devised cunningly but subconsciously, to make those males eager to go to war, no matter how terrible or unjust a war may be. There are just wars, too, of course. The war I was eager to go to happened to be a just one.

Your class spokesperson mourned the collapse of the institution of marriage in this country. Marriage is collapsing because our families are too small. A man cannot be a whole society to a woman, and a woman cannot be a whole society to a man. We try, but it is scarcely surprising that so many of us go to pieces.

As for boredom: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a German philosopher who died seventy-eight years ago, had this to say: “Against boredom even the gods contend in vain.” We are supposed to be bored. It is a part of life. Learn to put up with it, or you will not be what I have declared the members of this graduating class to be: mature women and men.

So it seems quite likely to me that young people of today in the United States of America are not in fact apathetic, but only look that way to people who are used to getting their ecstasies from hatred, among other things, of course. The members of your graduating class are not sleepy, are not listless, are not apathetic. They are simply performing the experiment of doing without hate. Hate is the missing vitamin or mineral or whatever in their diet, they have sensed correctly that hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide. This is a very exciting thing they are doing, and I wish them well.

Sigmund Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I am so smart I not only know what is wrong with the world, the Code of Hammurabi, but I know what women want. Women want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything. Men want a lot of pals—and they don’t want people to get mad at them.

But what they’re really yelling at each other about is loneliness. What they’re really saying is, “You’re not enough people.”

Only kidding, but seriously: there is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nutcases want to be president.

Listen: All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible, and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

Much has been written about the effects on institutions of higher learning of the sudden influx of veterans after my war. One thing it did was bamboozle many teachers whose authority and glamour was based on their having seen a lot more of life and the world than their students had. In seminars I would occasionally try to talk about something I had observed about human beings while a soldier, as a prisoner of war, as a family man. I had a wife and kid then. This turned out to be very bad manners, like coming to a crap game with loaded dice. No fair.

Mespoulets.

A husband, a wife, and some kids is not a family; it’s a terribly vulnerable survival unit.

Perhaps my good Uncle Alex will live on in some of you members of this graduating class, if, in the future, you will pause to say out loud every so often, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

I spent too much time celebrating this very moment and place—once the future we dreamed of so long ago. This is it. We’re here. How the heck did we do it?

He said, “As long as there is a lower class I am in it, as long as there is a criminal class I am of it, as long as there is a soul in prison I am not free.”

Notice when you’re happy, and know when you’ve got enough.

I have heard powerful men on both sides of the Iron Curtain praising the arts. I have been in their museums and concert balls. I have seen the common people attempting to appreciate the art treasures said to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars or rubles or what have you. The common people always look waterlogged. They seem to have double pneumonia. They swoon with apathy. This is what is supposed to happen. The purpose of the museums and concert halls and theaters and public statuary and so on is to persuade the common people that they are unworthy of holding power or making big money—because their minds and spirits are inferior. Proof of their inferiority is the fact that they are incapable of appreciating great art.

Be that as it may: I like the fine arts all right, but I doubt that they are any finer than a lot of other human games. And I deny most bitterly that persons claiming to love the fine arts are necessarily fine people.

There is some small chance, I suppose, that some works of art are closer to God or Truth or what have you than some other things which men have made. I am a Unitarian, so I wouldn’t know. I have no handles on God or Truth. I do know something about the American dream, since that is what brought my ancestors from Germany to Indiana so long ago. And I can name things men and women have done which are closer to the American dream than any book or statue or painting or building or song. These are the acts of social justice.

You must create an American people. There never has been one. You must create one now. We must create one now. This is a matter of life or death.

We must learn to deal with one another more frankly and openly, even humorously. But, more important than that, we must learn to touch. If we are to become a strong and decent people, we must become cousins now—eccentric cousins maybe, but cousins all the same. Blood is thicker than water. Let us learn from the Mafia. It is time, incidentally, that the white people in this country acknowledged that the so-called black people are actually blood relatives of theirs. This is easily proved. But this is no time to marvel and cackle over family trees. This is a time for us to become excited about being members of the family of man.

I give you my word of honor that we love you and need you. We love you simply because you are of our species. You have been born. That is enough.

Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership for so long for all of human experience so far that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on.

Our English teachers were very commonly serious writers. One of mine, the late Marguerite Young, went on to write the definitive biography of Indiana’s own Eugene Victor Debs, the middle-class labor leader and socialist candidate for President of the United States, who died in 1926, when I was 4. Millions voted for Debs when he ran for President.

If I have offended some of you by speaking ill of Thomas Jefferson, tough titty for you. I can say anything I please, short of shouting “Fire!” if there is no fire, because I am a citizen of the U.S.A. Your government does not exist and should not exist in order to keep you or anybody else, no matter what color, no matter what race, no matter what religion, from getting your damn fool feelings hurt.

The University of Chicago gave returning veterans a test on what they knew generally. They took my credits, which were in physics, chemistry, and math, and admitted me as a graduate student in anthropology.

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. That’s an important lesson, yet some people never hear of it. Then, when they’re adult, they can’t bear to hear of it. Culture is a gadget; it’s something we inherit. And you can fix it the way you fix a broken oil burner. You can fix it continuously.

Still, being a journalist influenced me as a novelist. I mean, a lot of critics think I’m stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.

When my father was dying, he said, “I want to thank you, because you’ve never put a villain in any of your stories.” The secret ingredient in my books is, there has never been a villain.

Yet it seems to me that it’s no more trouble to be virtuous than to be vicious.

My experiences at Cornell were freakish in the extreme, as have been most of those which followed, mostly accidents. So the advice I give myself at the age of 71 is the best advice I could have given myself in 1940, when detraining for the first time in Ithaca, having come all the way from Indianapolis: “Keep your hat on. We may wind up miles from here.”

If I have been censored a lot, then teachers and librarians have had to defend my books a lot. I do not imagine for a microsecond that they have done that because what I write is so true and beautiful. Many of them may hate what I write, even though I am, at my worst,

In this country, we do not play with a full deck of cards, which is what the censors find so hard to accept. We have agreed with one another, through the instrument of our Constitution, that we will not, when engaged in public business, behave as though the laws of God and nature were fully understood.

Perhaps the censors will agree with us, too, that the most disgraceful episodes in our treatment of human beings within our borders have taken place when some people’s idea of God’s law or natural law has been allowed to supersede our Constitution. I refer to human slavery, which so many Americans believed to be natural and even ordained by God only the day before yesterday, in my great-grandfather’s time. it was finally the enforcement of mere man’s law that made slavery illegal.

Fifty years ago, then, we might have been protesting the lynchings of human beings. How much less we have to complain of today—the lynchings of mere ideas, which cannot scream in pain.

Our founding fathers never promised us that this would be a painless form of Government, that adhering to the Bill of Rights would invariably be delightful. Nor are Americans proud of avoiding pain at all costs. On patriotic holidays, in fact, we boast of how much pain Americans have stood in order to protect their freedoms—draped over barbed wire, drowning in water-filled shell holes, and so on.

Heliogabalus had a hollow iron bull in his banquet hall that had a door in its side. Its mouth was a hole, so sound could get out. He would have a human being put inside the bull and then a fire built on a hearth under its belly, so that the guests at his banquets would be entertained by the noises the bull made. * We modern humans roast people alive, tear their arms and legs off, or whatever, using airplanes or missile launchers or ships or artillery batteries—and do not hear their screams.

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

“The good earth—we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.”

“Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. And since the creator of the universe is unknowable to us so far, we serve as best we can the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.”

“Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were roaring drunk on petroleum.”

“We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet—the only one in the whole Milky Way—with a century of transportation whoopee. Our government is conducting a war on drugs, is it? Let them go after petroleum! Talk about a destructive high! You put some of this stuff in your car and you can go a hundred miles an hour, run over the neighbor’s dog, and tear the atmosphere to smithereens.”

“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”