Artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. _x000D_ They are supersensitive. _x000D_ They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, _x000D_ long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.
Interpretation
Artists have a heightened sensitivity to societal issues and dangers.
Kurt Vonnegut highlights the essential role of artists in society, emphasizing their extraordinary sensitivity to prevailing social conditions and dangers. Just as canaries were used to detect toxic gas in coal mines, artists often sense and illuminate societal issues before others recognize them, serving as early warning signals about the health of society.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of creativity, I could use this quote to highlight how artists alert us to societal troubles.
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 great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men.
I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing.
Wherever a dancer stands is holy ground.
My strength is with actors. I think I'm good at working with them to get the best performances, at seeing what it is that they have and that the story needs.
I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.
Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.
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