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

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“There’s only one rule I know of—Goddam it, you’ve got to be kind.”

told her that what made life almost worth living for me was the saints I met. These were people who behaved compassionately and capably, no matter what, and they could be anywhere.

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.