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Any scientist who can't explain to an eight-year-old what he is doing is a charlatan.

Kurt Vonnegut

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Kurt Vonnegut
Age: 84 †
Born: 1922
Born: November 11
Died: 2007
Died: April 14
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Indianapolis
Indiana
Kurt Vonnegut
Jr.
Charlatan
Charlatans
Explain
Scientist
Eight
Year
Years

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We have such a young culture that there is an opportunity to contribute wonderful new myths to it, which will be accepted.
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Unhappy failures need not apply.
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She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.
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Son--they say there isn't any royalty in this country, but do you want me to tell you how to be king of the United States of America? Just fall through the hole in a privy and come out smelling like a rose.
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Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.
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When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away.
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Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.
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Hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide.
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We'd all do well to start over again, preferably with kindergarten.
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It shook up Trout to realize that even he could bring evil into the world — in the form of bad ideas.
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Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on.
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Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.
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The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. You are afraid of pain now, Unk, but you won't learn anything if you don't invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.
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How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
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A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.
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Terry Southern is the illegitimate son of Mack Sennett and Edna Saint Vincent Millay.
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You are reading a bold and universal headline which says ,’I am here, I am here, I am here.
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One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.
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I'm so sorry - we had this cottage up in Lake Maxinkuckee, in Culver. I've thought so often of the poor Pottawattomies we took this land away from. They must have loved it so.
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One of the things I'm going to say out there is how grateful I am - and how grateful the world is - for the tremendous gift of the black people, of jazz.
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