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Kurt Vonnegut Jr : Well, I've worried some about, you know, why write books ... why are we teaching people to write books when presidents and senators do not read them, and generals do not read them. And it's been the university experience that taught me that there is a very good reason, that you catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and you poison their minds with ... humanity, and however you want to poison their minds, it's presumably to encourage them to make a better world. # Books - Reading # Writers and Writing # Worry

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr quote-Well, I've worried some about, you know, why write books ... why are...

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Joshua Micah Marshall : " With all the efforts now to disassociate President Bush from conservatism, I am starting to believe that conservatism itself — not the political machine, mind you, but the ideology — is heading toward that misty land-over-the-ocean where ideologies go after they've shuffled off this mortal coil. Sort of like the way post-Stalinist lefties used to say, "You can't say Communism's failed. It's just never really been tried." But as it was with Communism, so with conservatism. When all the people who call themselves conservatives get together and run the government, they're on the line for it. Conservative president. Conservative House. Conservative Senate. What we appear to be in for now is the emergence of this phantom conservatism existing out in the ether, wholly cut loose from any connection to the actual people who are universally identified as the conservatives and who claim the label for themselves. We can even go a bit beyond this though. The big claim now is that President Bush isn't a conservative because he hasn't shrunk the size of government and he's a reckless deficit spender. But let's be honest: Balanced budgets and shrinking the size of government hasn't been part of conservatism — or to be more precise, Movement Conservatism — for going on thirty years. The conservative movement and the Republican party are the movement and party of deficit spending. And neither has any claim to any real association with limited or small government. Just isn't borne out by any factual record or political agenda. Not in the Reagan presidency, the Bush presidency or the second Bush presidency. The intervening period of fiscal restraint comes under Clinton. " # Books - Reading # Writers and Writing # Worry

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Orhan Pamuk : " The question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but—as in a dream—can’t quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy. " # Books - Reading # Writers and Writing # Worry

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Robert Mugabe : " Let Mr. Bush read history correctly. Let him realise that both personally and in his representative capacity as the current President of the United States, he stands for this "civilisation" which occupied, which colonised, which incarcerated, which killed. He has much to atone for and very little to lecture us on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His hands drip with innocent blood of many nationalities. [3] " # Books - Reading # Writers and Writing # Worry

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William Julius Wilson : " A lot of joblessness in the black community doesn't seem to be reachable through fiscal and monetary policies. People have not been drawn into the labor market even during periods of economic recovery. Our study clearly shows that employers would rather not hire a lot of workers from the inner city. They feel people from the inner city are not job-ready, that the kids have been poorly educated, that they can't read, they can't write, they can't speak. " # Books - Reading # Writers and Writing # Worry

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Andrei Codrescu : " Many have been speculating on the future of New Orleans. Reading these stories has given me hope that it has one. New Orleans is an] intoxicating brew of rotting and generating, a feeling of death and life simultaneously occurring and inextricably linked, ... The city can drive a sober-minded person insane, but it feeds the dreamer. It feeds the dreamer stories, music and food. Really great food. " # Books - Reading # Writers and Writing # Worry

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L Frank Baum : " If you will take the trouble to consult your dictionary, you will find that demons may be either good or bad, like any other class of beings. Originally all demons were good, yet of late years people have come to consider all demons evil. I do not know why. Should you read Hesiod you will find he says: 'Soon was a world of holy demons made, Aerial spirits, by great Jove designed To be on earth the guardians of mankind.' " "But Jove was himself a myth," objected Rob, who had been studying mythology. The Demon shrugged his shoulders. "Then take the words of Mr. Shakespeare, to whom you all defer," he replied. "Do you not remember that he says: 'Thy demon (that's thy spirit which keeps thee) is Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable.' " "Oh, if Shakespeare says it, that's all right,' answered the boy." " # Books - Reading # Writers and Writing # Worry

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Robert Anton Wilson : " The Western World has been brainwashed by Aristotle for the last 2,500 years. The unconscious, not quite articulate, belief of most Occidentals is that there is one map which adequately represents reality. By sheer good luck, every Occidental thinks he or she has the map that fits. Guerrilla ontology, to me, involves shaking up that certainty. I use what in modern physics is called the "multi-model" approach, which is the idea that there is more than one model to cover a given set of facts. As I've said, novel writing involves learning to think like other people. My novels are written so as to force the reader to see things through different reality grids rather than through a single grid. It's important to abolish the unconscious dogmatism that makes people think their way of looking at reality is the only sane way of viewing the world. My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything. If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind. It's only possible to see people when one is able to see the world as others see it. That's what guerrilla ontology is — breaking down this one-model view and giving people a multi-model perspective. " # Books - Reading # Writers and Writing # Worry

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Madeleine L Engle : " I wrote A Wrinkle in Time when we were living in a small dairy farm village in New England. I had three small children to raise, and life was not easy. We lost four of our closest friends within two years by death — that's a lot of death statistically. And I really wasn't finding the answers to my big questions in the logical places. So, at the time I discovered the world of particle physics. I discovered Einstein and relativity. I read a book of Einstein's, in which he said that anyone who's not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe is as good as a burnt-out candle. And I thought, "Oh, I've found my theologian, what a wonderful thing." " # Books - Reading # Writers and Writing # Worry

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Bernard Devoto : " Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid enough to abandon representative government for any other kind, including government by the guy who knows. " # Books - Reading # Writers and Writing # Worry

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Henry David Thoreau : " If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonal experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations. " # Books - Reading # Writers and Writing # Worry

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr Wisdom feed

261 tweets

Kurt Vonnegut Jr: " We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." # Appearance

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr: " Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance." # Character # Flaws # Growth

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr: " We are what we imagine ourselves to be." # Imagination

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr: " We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap." # World

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr: " There's only one me, and I'm stuck with him." # Self-love # Love # Action

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr: " The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth." # Army and Navy # Music # Example

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr: " Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before, Bokonon tells us. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way." # Caution # Murder # Learning

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr: " Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we've got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that's why you ought to be glad you're an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they're doing." # America # Freedom # Power

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr: " Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people." # Illusion # Books - Reading # Cinema

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr: " I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival." # Intelligence and Intellectuals # Evolution # Poverty and The Poor

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