Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism Iraq in cynical money-making. And there's no optimism or idealism now -- Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. We're proud of being ignorant that leaves virtue at our core. We aren't frazzled by knowledge like foreigners, so we can be trusted.

Any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.

The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of a zipper on the fly of God Almighty.

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren.

On Tralfamadore, says Billy Pilgrim, there isn't much interest in Jesus Christ. The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind, he says, is Charles Darwin - who taught that those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements. So it goes.

That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues.

She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.