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.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the moral hypocrisy of leaders who professed religious values while endorsing slavery and denying women rights.
Kurt Vonnegut reflects on the moral and ethical contradictions prevalent in 1840s America, where leaders publicly adhered to religious principles yet condoned slavery and disenfranchised women. This hypocrisy underscores a larger commentary on how societal norms can often clash with professed beliefs, leading to injustices that starkly contradict the moral teachings of faith.
In practice
During a lecture on morality in governance.
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.
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.
Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?
Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind.
God has given you your country as cradle, and humanity as mother; you cannot rightly love your brethren of the cradle if you love not the common mother.
That world is ended, as if it had never been. Let the race of Adam and Eve take warning.
We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of the word. The fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness
Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.
To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.
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