If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of free expression and openness to diverse ideas within a community.
Kurt Vonnegut's quote advocates for the fundamental principle of free speech and the necessity of allowing a variety of ideas to be shared and discussed in a democratic society. It suggests that true understanding and progress can only occur when all voices, not just one's own, are heard, promoting dialogue and fostering a more inclusive community.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of democracy, I could quote Vonnegut to emphasize the value of diverse ideas.
But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.
I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.
How subservient to Jesus, or to a humane God Almighty, were the leaders of this country back in the 1840's, when Marx said such a supposedly evil thing about religion? They had made it perfectly legal to own human slaves, and weren't going to led women vote or hold public office, God forbid, for another eighty year.
All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States - and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - "God damn it, you've got to be kind."
If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still--if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.
All problems are illusions of the mind.
I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.
The fragrance of sandalwood and rosebay does not travel far. But the fragrance of virtue rises to the heavens.
I just have a sense that, you know, I'm curious about what is religion about, you know? Why do some of us still engage it? It's not because it's a set of old beliefs or old ideas. Or even, particularly, the view that this is the only true religion. Many of us no longer accept those views.
It was both odd and unjust, a real example of pitiful arbitrariness of existance, that you were born into a particular time & held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not. It gave you an indecent advantage over the past and made you a clown vis-a-vis the future.
The truth of Nature is a part of the truth of God; to him who does not search it out, darkness; to him who does, infinity.
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