My theory is that Kurt had a lot of residual pain from his childhood. And when you pile that on top of his experience in World War II - he was in Dresden when it was bombed and saw a city annihilated. When you combine those two things, my impression of Kurt Vonnegut at 84 was that he was a very pained and haunted man.
The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.
I'm not resigning, and I'm going to try very hard to go back to work a better man and a better husband too.
It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.
Women are not weaker. Read that again. Women are not weaker. They are just as strong, just as resolute, just as creative, and are filled with just as much potential as any man.
As the Wall Street Journal called our economic plan, supply-side economics for the working man, is resonating in Minnesota and here in Missouri and across this country.
In each medium - popular music, literature, and visual art, respectively - the woman has broken form, shed a skin, with each phase of her career, whereas the man has returned to ever-deepening iterations of the sound or sentence or imagery with which he began.
In many organisms, including man, the mechanical respiration and the circulation of the blood are 'regulated' so as to correspond to the demand of the moment.
If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go.
The mark of the man is how he responds to situations. You're not going to avoid tough times. We're all over the barrel some of the time. What are you going to do about it?
What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.
In restoring man from evil sovereignty, we must cheat.
The wise man should restrain his senses like the crane and accomplish his purpose with due knowledge of his place, time and ability.
There are two basic restrictions on marriage in the Bible: Number one, she should marry a man. Number two, he should be a Christian.
'The Reader' is about a young man's experience of falling in love with somebody who, it turns out, made some choices that were unavoidable in her life that resulted in horrific crimes against humanity.
It's hard for any man to take something thrown at his face and not to retaliate.
Mathematical discoveries, like springtime violets in the woods, have their season which no man can hasten or retard.
And when native man left off this form of development, his humanization was retarded in growth.
When a man retires, his wife gets twice the husband but only half the income.
'Man cave' seems retrograde, but 'she shed' seems progressive. Or maybe it's just a place for me to eat embarrassing amounts of chocolate in private.