If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.
Interpretation
Nature can be both friendly and fierce; underestimating its power can lead to dire consequences.
Kurt Vonnegut emphasizes the complex relationship between humans and nature. While many may perceive nature as benign or friendly due to its beauty and resources, this perspective can be dangerously naive, suggesting that nature's true power can also be adversarial, leading to significant challenges and threats if disrespected or misunderstood.
In practice
In a speech about environmental protection, one might quote Vonnegut to illustrate our risky relationship with the environment.
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.
The tree that is beside the running water is fresher and gives more fruit.
January gray is here, like a sexton by her grave; February bears the bier, march with grief doth howl and rave, and April weeps -- but, O ye hours! Follow with May's fairest flowers.
Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can't.
I'm not an animal lover if that means you think things are nice if you can pat them, but I am intoxicated by animals.
It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you wantβoh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!
Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
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