Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.
Interpretation
Science alone cannot provide comfort in the face of harsh truths about humanity.
Kurt Vonnegut's quote reflects a deep skepticism about the role of science in addressing the emotional and existential challenges of humanity. He suggests that while science may uncover facts and truths, it often reveals harsh realities that can be disheartening rather than uplifting, highlighting a profound contradiction between knowledge and human comfort.
In practice
In a lecture on the limitations of scientific understanding, this quote can highlight the emotional aspects of human experience.
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.
In the frantic search for an elusive 'cure,' few researchers stand back and ask a very basic question: why does cancer exist? What is its place in the grand story of life?
The blessed spirits must be sought within the self which is common to all
It's not a coincidence that in the Scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It's not an accident. That's a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions.
Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.
I don't think most people are aware of the exotic and extreme tools at the disposal of the most powerful and wealthy men of America when they are bent at silencing accusations against them.
Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness.
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