Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy’s wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.” Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are.

there i was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic tv, with virtually no health services for the poor. where to go? what to do?

People who are wary of what they might find in a book if they opened one are right to be.

It is harder to be unhappy when you are eating.

We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.

My ancestors were Freethinkers - and that's what I am, except we're called secular humanists now.