Kurt Vonnegut on Mind

"Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind."

"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."

"Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals."

"I don't think there would be many jokes, if there weren't constant frustration and fear and so forth. It's a response to bad troubles like crime."

"If you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington DC."

"Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease."

"People hate it when they're tickled because laughter is not pleasant, if it goes on too long. I think it's a desperate sort of convulsion in desperate circumstances, which helps a little."

"You know, in a way I wish I hadn’t met you two. It’s much more convenient to think of the opposition as a nice homogeneous, dead-wrong mass. Now I've got to muddy my thinking with exceptions."

"I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak."

"I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can't help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That’s why we’ve got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap."

"Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward — and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner."