Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the human tendency to seek explanations for events and outcomes.
Kurt Vonnegut reflects on the unique human ability to interpret events, providing reasoning and structure to the world around us. He suggests that humans are not just passive observers but active explainers, continuously analyzing how events unfold and how they can influence future occurrences, emphasizing our role in understanding and shaping our reality.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of human existence during a philosophy class.
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.
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.
Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
I had gradually come, by this time [1839-01], to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc. and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Much evil must befall a country before it wholly forgets the Elves, if once they dwelt there.
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