Player Piano Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.

And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings," said Paul, "not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.

Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.

Don't put one foot in your job and the other in your dream, Ed. Go ahead and quit, or resign yourself to this life. It's just too much of a temptation for fate to split you right up the middle before you've made up your mind which way to go.

If it weren't for the people, the god-damn people' said Finnerty, 'always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren't for them, the world would be an engineer's paradise.

Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. [...] Big, undreamed-of things--the people on the edge see them first.

You think I'm insane?" said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him. "You're still in touch. I guess that's the test." "Barely — barely." "A psychiatrist could help. There's a good man in Albany." Finnerty shook his head. "He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." He nodded, "Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.

That man's got a lot of get up and go," said Anita. "He fills me full of lie down and die," said Paul.

Anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave," said Harrison thickly, and he left.

Nobody’s so damn well educated that you can’t learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration.

It isn't knowledge that's making trouble, but the uses it's put to.

He would make a good lamp post if he'd weather better and didn't have to eat.

Almost nobody’s competent, Paul. It’s enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

Sordid things, for the most part, are what make human beings, my father included, move. That's what it is to be human, I'm afraid.

Don't you see, Doctor?" said Lasher. "The machines are to practically everbody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don't apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines.

He watched his brother find peace of mind through psychiatry. That’s why he won’t have anything to do with it. I don’t follow. Isn’t his brother happy? Utterly and always happy. And my husband says somebody’s just got to be maladjusted; that somebody’s got to be uncomfortable enough to wonder where people are, where they’re going, and why they’re going there.

What do you expect?" he said. "For generations they've been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men-and boom! it's all yanked out from under them. They can't participate, can't be useful any more. Their whole culture's been shot to hell.

Not slaves,” said Halyard, chuckling patronizingly. “Citizens, employed by government.

Well, it just don’t seem like nobody feels he’s worth a crap to nobody no more, and it’s a hell of a screwy thing, people gettin’ buggered by things they made theirselves.

The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings,

Ilium, New York, is divided into three parts.

I have graded my separate works from A to D. The grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself. Thus can I give myself an A-plus for Cat’s Cradle, while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare. The report card is chronological, so you can plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like: Player Piano B The Sirens of Titan A Mother Night A Cat’s Cradle A-plus God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A Slaughterhouse-Five A-plus Welcome to the Monkey House B-minus Happy Birthday, Wanda June D Breakfast of Champions C Wampeters, Foma & Grandfalloons C Slapstick D Jailbird A Palm Sunday C

But there’s two kinds of work, kid, work and hard work. If you want to stand out, have something to sell, you got to do hard work. Pick out something impossible and do it, or be a bum the rest of your life.

And the charming little cottage he'd taken as a symbol of the good life of a farmer was as irrelevant as a statue of Venus at the gate of a sewage-disposal plant.

He said goodbye and good luck, and that some of the greatest prophets were crazy as bedbugs.

...three thousand dream houses for three thousand families with presumably identical dreams.

Things, gentlemen, are ripe for a phony Messiah, and when he comes, it's sure to be a bloody business.

And the lawyers! Of course, I say it’s a pretty good thing what happened to them, because it was a bad thing for them, which couldn’t help to be a good thing for everybody else.

Everything you think you think because somebody promoted the ideas. Education—nothing but promotion.

It was a beautifully simple picture these procession leaders had. It was as though a navigator, in order to free his mind of worries, had erased all the reefs from his maps." - Chapter 21

But, to Shepherd, life seemed to be laid out like a golf course, with a series of beginnings, hazards, and ends, and with a definite summing up—for comparison with others scores—after each hole.

Well, 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.

He knew with all his heart that the human situation was a frightful botch, but it was such a logical, intelligently arrived-at botch that he couldn't see how history could possibly have led anywhere else.

You think I'm insane?" said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him. "You're still in touch. I Guess that's the test." "Barely-barely." "A psychiatrist could help. There's a good man in Albany." Finnerty shook his head. "He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out there on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center." He nodded, "Big, undreamed-of things--the people on the edge see them first.

Without regard for the wishes of men, any machines or techniques or forms of organization that can economically replace men do replace men. Replacement is not necessarily bad, but to do it without regard for the wishes of men is lawlessness.

I became a so-called science fiction writer when someone decreed that I was a science fiction writer. I did not want to be classified as one, so I wondered in what way I'd offended that I would not get credit for being a serious writer. I decided that it was because I wrote about technology, and most fine American writers know nothing about technology. I got classified as a science fiction writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady, New York. My first book, Player Piano, was about Schenectady. There are huge factories in Schenectady and nothing else. I and my associates were engineers, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians. And when I wrote about the General Electric Company and Schenectady, it seemed a fantasy of the future to critics who had never seen the place.

It was an archaic expression of friendship by an undisciplined man in an age when most men seemed in mortal fear of being mistaken for pansies for even a split second.

They had been the rioters, the smashers of machines.

It’s just a hell of a time to be alive,

The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don’t apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines.

To the people who were going to be replaced by machines, maybe. A third one, eh? In a way, I guess the third one’s been going on for some time, if you mean thinking machines. That would be the third revolution, I guess—machines that devaluate human thinking. Some of the big computers like EPICAC do that all right, in specialized fields.

Of course you’re right. It’s just a hell of a time to be alive, is all—just this goddamn messy business of people having to get used to new ideas. And people just don’t, that’s all. I wish this were a hundred years from now, with everybody used to the change.

The Sovereignty of the United States resides in the people, not in the machines, and it's the people's to take back, if they so wish. The machines," said Paul, "have exceeded the personal sovereignty willingly surrendered to them by the American people for the good government. Machines and organization and pursuit of efficiency have robbed the American people of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

If Checker Charley was out to make chumps out of men, he could damn well fix his own connections. Paul looks after his own circuits; let Charley do the same. Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.” He gathered up the bills from the table. “Good night.

I’m going to get myself a uniform, so I’ll know what I think and stand for.

If only it weren’t for the people, the goddamned people,” said Finnerty, “always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren’t for them, earth would be an engineer’s paradise.

He remembered his cry of the night before: We must meet in the middle of the Bridge!

And what does an anthropologist do these days?" sad Paul. "Same thing a supernumerary minister does--becomes a public charge, a bore, or possibly a rum-dum, or a bureaucrat.

Sordid things, for the most part, are what make human beings, my father included, move. That's what it is to be human, I'm afraid.

Yesterday’s snow job becomes today’s sermon.

Objectively, know-how and world law were getting their long-awaited chance to turn earth into an altogether pleasant and convenient place in which to sweat out Judgment Day.

It's fresh to you because you're too young to know anything but the way things are now. Actually, it is kind of incredible that things were ever any other way, isn't it?

It was an appalling thought, to be so well-integrated into the machinery of society and history as to be able to move in only one plane, and along one line.

Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.

But you find out quick enough that old friends are old friends, and nothing more—no wiser, no more help than anyone else.

the First Industrial Revolution devalued muscle work, then the second one devalued routine mental work. I was fascinated.

Anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave,” said Harrison thickly, and he left.

beaters of systems had always been admired by the conventional.

The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings,” said

When he was with Finnerty he liked to pretend that he shared the man’s fantastic and alternately brilliant or black inner thoughts—almost as though he were discontent with his own relative tranquility.

Sooner or later someone's going to catch the imagination of these people with some new magic. At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being neede on earth - hell, dignity. The police are bright enough to look for people like that, and lock them up under the antisabotage laws. But sooner or later someone's going keep out of thei site long enough to organize a following.

At this point in history, 1952 A.D., our lives and freedom depend largely upon the skill and imagination and courage of our managers and engineers, and I hope that God will help them to help us all stay alive and free.

The record," said Finnerty, and he seemed satisfied with the toast. He had got what he wanted from the revolution, Paul supposed--a chance to give a savage blow to a close little society that made no comfortable place for him.

He hadn't had the satisfaction of telling someone he'd quit, of being believed; but he'd quit. Goodbye. None of this had anything to do with him anymore. Better to be nothing than a blind doorman at the head of civilization's parade.

This crusading spirit of the managers and engineers, the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy war: all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days, which it certainly wasn't in the beginning. Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday's snow job becomes today's sermon.

Lasher smiled sadly. "The great American indvidual," he said. "Thinks he's the embodiment of liberal thought throughout the ages. Stands on his own two feet, by God, alone and motionless. He'd make a good lamp post, if he'd weather better and didn't have to eat.

You keep giving the managers and engineers a bad time," said Paul. "What about the scientists? It seems to me that -" "Outside the discussion," said Lasher impatiently. "They simply add to knowledge. It isn't knowledge that's making trouble, but the uses it's put to.

And another nice thing about war—not that anything about war is nice, I guess—is that while it’s going on and you’re in it, you never worry about doing the right thing. See? Up there, fighting and all, you couldn’t be righter. You could of been a heller at home and made a lot of people unhappy and all, and been a dumb, mean bastard, but you’re king over there—king to everybody, and especially to yourself. This above all, be true to yourself, and you can’t be false to anybody else, and that’s it—in a hole, being shot at and shooting back.

Call yourself a doctor, too, do you?” said Mr. Haycox. “I think I can say without fear of contradiction that I earned that degree,” said Doctor Pond coolly. “My thesis was the third longest in any field in the country that year—eight hundred and ninety-six pages, double-spaced, with narrow margins.” “Real-estate salesman,” said Mr. Haycox. He looked back and forth between Paul and Doctor Pond, waiting for them to say something worth his attention. When they’d failed to rally after twenty seconds, he turned to go. “I’m doctor of cowshit, pigshit, and chickenshit,” he said. “When you doctors figure out what you want, you’ll find me out in the barn shoveling my thesis.

That’s just it: things haven’t always been that way. It’s new, and it’s people like us who’ve brought it about. Hell, everybody used to have some personal skill or willingness to work or something he could trade for what he wanted. Now that the machines have taken over, it’s quite somebody who has anything to offer. All most people can do is hope to be given something.

God help us," said Paul. "But, I dunno, this Ghost Shirt thing - it's kind of childish, isn't it? Dressing up like that, and -" "Childish - like Hitler's Brown Shirts, like Mussolini's Black Shirts. Childish like any uniform," said Lasher. "We don't deny it's childish. At the same time, we admit that we've got to be a little childish, anyway, to get the big following we need.

Please, what are public relations?” said Khashdrahr. “That profession,” said Halyard, quoting by memory from the Manual, “that profession specializing in the cultivation, by applied psychology in mass communication media, of favorable public opinion with regard to controversial issues and institutions, without being offensive to anyone of importance, and with the continued stability of the economy and society its primary goal.

I will say you've shown up what thin stuff clergymen were peddling, most of them. When I had a congregation before the war, I used to tell them that the life of their spirit in relation to God was the biggest thing in their lives, and that their part in the economy was nothing by comparison. Now, you people have engineered them out of their part in the economy, in the market place, and they're finding out--most of them--that what's left is just about zero. A good bit short of enough, anyway.

Every child older than six knew the fork, and knew what the good guys did here, and what the bad guys did here. The fork was a familiar one in folk tales the world over, and the good guys and the bad guys, whether in chaps, breechclouts, serapes, leopardskins, or banker’s gray pinstripes, all separated here. Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn’t—no matter when, no matter what. Kroner cleared his throat. “I said, ‘who’s their leader, Paul?’ ” “I am,” said Paul. “And I wish to God I were a better one.

The four had come to an exciting decision" during the six months of the blockade threatened by the authorities, they would make the ruins a laboratory, a demonstration of how well and happily men could live with virtually no machines. They saw now the common man's wisdom in wrecking practically everything. That was the way to do it, and the hell with moderation! "All right, so we'll heat our water and cook our food and light and warm our homes with wood fires," said Lasher. "And walk wherever we're going," said Finnerty. "And read books instead of watching television," said von Neumann. "The Renaissance comes to upstate New York! We'll rediscover the two greatest wonders of the world, the human mind and hand.

A psychiatrist could help. There’s a good man in Albany.” Finnerty shook his head. “He’d pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” He nodded. “Big, undreamed-of things—the people on the edge see them first.

Shah says," said Khashdrahr, " 'Before we take this first step, please, would you ask EPICAC what people are for?

No, but we got ideas of our own later on. Wonderful ideas," said Finnerty. "Happiest I ever was, I guess, Paul; so damn engrossed, I never looked up to notice anything else." "Most fascinating game there is, keeping things from staying the way they are." "If only it weren't for the people, the goddamned people," said Finnerty, "always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren't for them, earth would be an engineer's paradise.

What distinguishes man from the rest of the animals is his ability to do artificial things," said Paul. "To his greater glory, I say. And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

The machines and the institutions of government were so integrated that trying to attack one without damaging the other was like trying to removed a diseased brain in order to save a patient. There would have to a be a seizure of power - a benevolent seizure, but a seizure nonetheless.

The sovereignty of the United States resides in the people, not in the machines, and it's the people's to take back, if they so wish. The machines," said Paul, "have exceeded the personal sovereignty willingly surrendered to them by the American people for the good of government. machines and organizations and pursuit of efficiency have robbed the American people of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But, even if there weren't this unpleasant business between me and the memory of my father, I think I would believe in the arguments against the lawlessness of the machines. There are men who don't hate their fathers, so far as I know, who believe in the arguments. What the hate does, I think, is to make me not only believe, but want to do something about the system. Does the needle agree?

And the Ghost Dance movement proved what?" said Paul. "That being a good Indian was as important as being a good white man - important enough to fight and die for, no matter what the odds. They fought against the same odds we fought against: a thousand to one, maybe, or a little more." Paul and Ed Finnerty looked at him incredulously. "You thought we were sure to lose?" said Paul huskily. "Certainly," said Lasher, looking at him as thought Paul had said something idiotic. "But you've been talking all along as thought it were almost a sure thing," said Paul. "Of course, Doctor," said Lasher patiently. "If we hadn't all talked that way, we wouldn't have had that one chance in a thousand. But I didn't let myself lose touch with reality." Lasher, Paul realized, was the only one who hadn't lost touch with reality.

The four had come to an exciting decision: during the six months of blockade threatened by the authorities, they would make the ruins a laboratory, a demonstration of how well and happily men could live with virtually no machines. They saw now the common man's wisdom in wrecking practically everything. That was the way to do it, and the hell with moderation!

Don't you see, Doctor?" said Lasher. "The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don't apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines.

The man had been desperately unhappy then. Now he was proud and smiling because his hands were busy doing what they liked to do best, Paul supposed - replacing men like himself with machines.

I am proud to say," said the girl, "that he's one of the few men on earth with a little self-respect left." Khashdrahr translated that last bit, and the Shah shook his head sadly. The Shah removed a ruby ring and pressed it into her hand. "Ti, sibi Takaru. Dibo. Brahous brahouna, houna saki. Ippi goura Brahouna ta tippo a mismit." He opened the limousine door for her. "What did the gentleman say?" she asked. "He said to take the ring, pretty little citizen," said Khashdrahr tenderly. "He said goodbye and good luck, and that some of the greatest prophets were crazy as bedbugs.

Paul wondered at what thorough believers in mechanization most Americans were, even when their lives had been badly damaged by mechanization. The conductor's plaint, like the lament of so many, wasn't that it was unjust to take jobs from men and give them to machines, but that the machines didn't do nearly as many human things as good designers could have made them do.

Sure you work!" said Alfy. "Everybody works at something. Getting out of bed's work! Getting food off your plate and into your mouth's work! But there's two kinds of work, kid, work and hard work. If you want to stand out, have something to sell, you got to do hard work. Pick out something impossible and do it, or be a bum the rest of your life. Sure, everybody worked in George Washington's time, but George Washington worked hard. Everybody worked in Shakespeare's time, but Shakespeare worked hard. I'm who I am because I worked hard.

What have you got against machines?" said Buck. "They're slaves." "Well, what the heck," said Buck. "I mean, they aren't people. They don't suffer. They don't mind working." "No. But they compete with people." "That's a pretty good thing, isn't it - considering what a sloppy job most people do of anything?" "Anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave," said Harrison thickly, and he left.

...Doesn't he believe in psychiatry?" "Yes, indeed. He watched his brother find peace of mind through psychiatry. That's why he won't have anything to do with it." "I don't follow. Isn't his brother happy?" "Utterly and always happy. And my husband says somebody's just got to be maladjusted; that somebody's got to be uncomfortable enough to wonder where people are, where they're going, and why they're going there. That was the trouble with his book. It raised those questions, and was rejected.

But, you know, terrible as that mess was - not just Wheeler, but the whole war - it brought out the greatness in the American people. There's something about war that brings out greatness. I hate to say that, but it's true. Of course, maybe that's because you can get great so quick in a war. Just one damn fool thing for a couple of seconds, and you're great. I could be the greatest barber in the world, and maybe I am, but I'd have to prove it with a lifetime of great haircutting, and then nobody'd notice. That's just the way peacetime things are, you know?

And," the girl continued, "it had an antimachine theme." Halyard's eyebrows arched high. "Well! I should hope they wouldn't print it! What on earth does he think he's doing? Good lord, you're lucky is he isn't behind bars, inciting to advocate the commission of sabotage like that. He didn't really think somebody's print it, did he?" "He didn't care. He had to write it, so he wrote it." "Why doesn't he write about clipper chips, or something like that? This book about the old days on the Erie Canal - the man who wrote that is cleaning up. Big demand for that bare-chested stuff." She shrugged helplessly. "Because he never got mad at clipper ships or the Erie Canal, I guess.

Jesus Christ," Berringer was saying, "I mean, Christ, boy, that was a show. You know, it's entertainment, and still you learn something, too. Christ! When you do both, that's art, boy. Christ, and that wasn't cheap to put on, either, I'll bet." Ed Harrison of Ithaca stopped and picked up a bit of stone from the side of the path. "I'll be damned," he said. "An arrowhead!" "A nice one, too," said Paul, admiring the relic. "So there really were Indians on this island," said Harrison. "For chrissakes, you crazy bastard," said Berringer. "You deaf, dumb, and blind? Whaddya think they been trying to tell you for the past half-hour?

But he was great, and nobody'd argue about that, but do you think he could be great today, in this modern day and age? Wheeler? Elm Wheeler? You know what he would be today? A Reek and Wreck, that's all. The war made him, and this life would have killed him.

And another nice thing about war - not that anything about war is nice, I guess - is that while it's going on and you're in it, you never worry about doing the right thing. See? Up there, fighting and all, you couldn't be righter. You could of been a heller at home and made a lot of people unhappy and all, and been a dumb, mean bastard, but you're king over there - king to everybody, and especially to yourself. This above all, be true to yourself, and you can't be false to anybody else, and that's it - in a hole, being shot at and shooting back.

Paul, your father tells me you're real smart." Paul had nodded uncomfortably. "That's good, Paul, but that isn't enough." "No, sir." "Don't be bluffed." "No, sir, I won't." "Everybody's shaking in his boots, so don't be bluffed." "No, sir." "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration." "Yes, sir." "Show me a specialist, and I'll show you a man who's so scared he's dug a hole for himself to hide in." "Yes, sir." "Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind." "Yes, sir." "Want to be rich, Paul?" "Yes, sir - I guess so. Yes, sir." "All right. I got rich, and I told you ninety per cent of what I know about it. The rest is decoration. All right?" "Yes, sir.

Your conscience, dammit - doesn't it ever bother you?" "Why should it? I've never done anything dishonest." "Let me put it another way: do you agree things are a mess?" "Between us?" "Everywhere! The world!" She could be appallingly nearsighted. Whenever possible, she liked to reduce any generalization to terms of herself and persons she knew intimately. "Homestead, for instance." "What else could be possibly give the people that they haven't got?" "There! You made my point for me. You said, what else could we give them, as though everything in the world were ours to give or withhold." "Somebody's got to take responsibility, and that's just the way it is when somebody does." "That's just it: things haven't always been that way. It's new, and it's people like us who've brought it about. Hell, everybody used to have some personal skill or willingness to work or something he could trade for what he wanted. Now that the machines have taken over, it's quiet somebody who has anything to offer. All most people can do is hope to be given something." "If someone has brains," said Anita firmly, "he can still get to the top. That's the American way, Paul, and it hasn't changed." She looked at him appraisingly. "Brains and nerve, Paul." "And blinders.

Paul reflected that Baer was possibly the most just, reasonable, and candid person he'd ever known - remarkably machine-like in that the only problems he interested himself in were those brought to him, and in that he went to work on all problems with equal energy and interest, insensitive to quality and scale.

Anita - I brought us here because I think it's high time we got a completely new perspective, not on just our relationship to ourselves, but on our relationship to society as a whole." He didn't like the sound of the words as they came out, sententious an inflated. Their impact on Anita was nothing. He tried again: "In order to get what we've got, Anita, we have, in effect, traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them - the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect." That wasn't much good either. He wasn't getting through to Anita yet. She still seemed certain that she was somehow being punished by him. He tried once more: "Darling, when I see what we've got, and then see what these people have got, I feel like a horse's ass." A glimmering of understanding crossed Anita's face.

I told you: so we could both get the feel of the world as a whole, not just our side of the river. So we could see what our way of life has done to the lives of others." Anita was on top of the situation now, having successfully attacked and confused Paul, and having found that she wasn't be baited or punished. "They all look perfectly well fed to me." "But they've had the spiritual stuffing knocked out of them by people like my father, like Kroner and Baer and Shepard, like us." "They couldn't have been too well stuffed in the first place, or they wouldn't be here." Paul was mad, and the delicate mechanism that kept him from hurting her stripped its gears. "Here, but for the grace of God, go you!" "Paul!" She burst into tears. "That's not fair," she said brokenly. "Not at all fair. I don't why you had to say that." "It isn't fair for you to cry.

No. He said you were a quitter." She sighed heavily. "He knows you better than I do, apparently." "God knows it'd be easy enough to stick with the system, and keep going right on up. It's getting out that takes nerve." "But why quit, if it's so easy to stick with it?" "Didn't you har anything I said in Homestead? That's why I took you there, so you'd get the feel of things." "That silly business about Katherine Finch and Shepherd?" "No, no - God, no. About how people like us have taken all the self-respect from all the others.

You know," said Halyard, "the ordinary man, like, well, anybody - those men working back on the bridge, the man in that old car we passed. The little man, no brilliant but a good-hearted, plain, ordinary, everyday kind of person." Khashdrahr translated. "Aha," said the Shah, nodding, "Takaru." "What did he say?" "Takaru," said Khashdrahr. "Slave.

Paul wished he had gone to the front, and heard the senseless tumult and thunder, and seen the wounded and dead, and maybe got a piece of shrapnel through his leg. Maybe he'd be able to understand then how good everything now was by comparison, to see what seemed so clear to others - that what he was doing, had done, and would do as a manager and engineer was vital, above reproach, and had, in fact, brought on a golden age. Of late, his job, the system, and organizational politics had left him variously annoyed, bored, and queasy.

Ci-ti-zen!" piped the Shah, smiling modestly at his newly acquired bilinguality. "Drop dead," called one of the rock throwers. Reluctantly, surlily, he came down to the road and moved two wheelbarrows very slowly, studying the car and its occupants as he did it. He stepped to one side. "Thanks! It's about time!" said Halyard as the limousine eased past the man. "You're welcome, Doc," said the man, and he spat in Halyard's face. Halyard sputtered, manfully regained his poise, and wiped his face. "Isolated incident," he said bitterly. "Takaru yamu brouha, pu dinka bu," said the Shah sympathetically. "The Shah," said Khashdrahr gravely, "he says it is the same with Takaru everywhere since the war." "No Takaru," said Halyear apathetically, and let it go.

It was an appalling thought, to be so well-integrated into the machinery of society and history as to be able to move in only one plane, and along one line. Finnerty's arrival was disturbing, for it brought to the surface the doubt that life should be that way.

Maybe. Something like that. Things are certainly set up for a class war based on conveniently established lines of demarkation. And I must say that the basic assumption of the present setup is a grade-A incitement to violence: The smarter you are, the better you are. Used to be that the richer you were, the better you were. Either one is, you'll admit, pretty tough for the have-not's to take. The criterion of brains is better than the one of money, but" - he held his thumb and forefinger about a sixteenth of an inch apart - "about that much better.

It's about as rigid a hierarchy as you can get," said Finnerty. "How's somebody going to up his IQ?" "Exactly," said Lasher. "And it's built on more than just brain power - it's built on special kinds of brain power. Not only must a person be bright, he must be bright in certain approved, useful direction: basically, management or engineering.

Then, unexpectedly and charmingly, Mr. Haycox smiled. "Wonder if I went an offended that there Doctor of Realty?" Pond had fled. "Well, I'll be getting back to work. Long as this here is going to be your farm, you might's well fix the pump. Needs a new packing." "Afraid I don't know how," said Paul. "Maybe," said Mr. Haycox walking away, "maybe if you'd gone to college another ten or twenty years, somebody would of gotten around to showing you how, Doctor.

He wanted to know if we weren't doing something bad in the name of progress." Baer sat on the desk and began taking kinks out of the telephone cord. he was thinking very hard, and from the man's expression Paul could only conclude that the question had never come to Baer's attention before. Now that it had, he was giving it his earnest consideration. "Is progress bad? Uh-huh - good question." He looked up from the cord. "I don't know, don't know. Maybe progress is bad, eh?" Kroner looked at him with surprise. "Look, you know darn good and well history's answered the question a thousand times." "It has? Has it? You know; I wouldn't. Answered it a thousand times, has it? That's good, good. All I know is, you've got to act like it has, or you might as well throw in the towel. Don't know, my boy. Guess I should, but I don't. Just do my job. Maybe that's wrong.

Halyard yawned and was annoyed to think that Lynn, who had just read "order out of chaos" as "order out of koze," made three times as much money as he did. Lynn, or, as Halyard preferred to think of him, Planck, hadn't even finished high school, and Halyard had known smarter Irish setters. Yet, here the son-of-a-bitch was, elected to more than a hundred thousand bucks a year!" "You mean to say that this man governs without respect to the people's spiritual destinies?" whispered Khashdrahr. "He has no religious duties, except very general ones, token ones," said Halyard, and then he started wondering just what the hell Lynn did do. EPICAC XIV and the National Industrial, Commercial, Communications, Foodstuffs, and Resources Board did all the planning, did all the heavy thinking. And the personnel machines saw to it that all governmental jobs of any consequence were filled by top-notch civil servants. The more Halyard thought about Lynn's fat pay check, the madder he got, because all the gorgeous dummy had to do was read whatever was handed to him on state occasions: to be suitably awed and reverent, as he said, for all the ordinary, stupid people who'd elected him to office, to run wisdom from somewhere else through that resonant voicebox and between those even, pearly choppers. And Halyard suddenly realized that, just as religion and government had been split into disparate entities centuries before, now, thanks to the machines, politics and government lived side by side, but touched almost nowhere. He stared at President Jonathan Lynn and imagined with horror what the country must have been like when, as today, any damn fool little American boy might grow up to be President, but when the President had had to actually run the country!

...And meanwhile, the tubes increased like rabbits." "And dope addiction, alcoholism, and suicide went up proportionally," said Finnerty. "Ed!" said Anita. "That was the war," said Kroner soberly. "It happens after every war." "And organized vice and divorce and juvenile delinquency, all parallel growth of the use of vacuum tubes," said Finnerty. "Oh, come on, Ed," said Paul, "you can't prove a logical connection between those factors." "If there's the slightest connection, it's worth thinking about," said Finnerty. "I'm sure there isn't enough connection for us to be concerned with here," said Kroner severely. "Or enough imagination or honesty," said Finnerty.

Takaru," said the Shah to Khashdraahr above the din. Khashdrahr nodded and smiled in agreement, "Takaru." "What the hell am I supposed to to?" said Halyard unhappily to the General of the Armies Bromley. "This guy thinks of everything he sees in terms of his own country, and his own country must be a Goddamn mess." "Amerikka vagga couna, ni houri manko Salim da vagga dinko," said the Shah. "What's eating him now?" said Halyard impatiently. "He say Americans have changed almost everything on earth," said Khashdrahr, "but it would be easier to move the Himalayas than to change the Army." The Shah was waving goodbye to the departing troops. "Dibo, Takaru, dibo.

Well," said Paul, "you'll have to admit they did some pretty wonderful things during the war." "Of course!" said Lasher. "What they did for the war effort really was something like crusading; but" - he shrugged - "so was what everybody else did for the war effort. Everybody behaved wonderfully. Even I.

If they were so fond of the old system, how come they were so cantankerous about their jobs when they had them?" said Paul. "Oh, this business we've got now - it's been going on for a long time now, not just since the last war. Maybe the actual jobs weren't being taken from the people, but the sense of participation, the sense of importance was. Go to the library sometime and take a look at magazines and newspapers clear back as far as World War ll. Even then there was a lot of talk about know-how winning the war of production - know-how, not people, not the mediocre people running most of the machines. And the hell of it was that it was pretty much true. Even then, half the people or more didn't understand much about the machines they worked at or the things they were making. They were participating in the economy all right, but not in a way that was very satisfying to the ego.

Lasher shrugged, "Oh, hell - prophecy's a thankless business, and history has way of showing us that, in retrospect, are very logical solutions to awful messes.

All our robot tanks’d been pulled out to support a push the 106th was makin’, so we was really alone.

If they had to have a football rally, he wished they’d hold it somewhere where it wouldn’t bother him and his team.

The crisis was coming, he knew, when he would have to quit or turn informer, but its approach was unreal, and, lacking a decisive plan for meeting it, he forced a false tranquility on himself--a vague notion that everything would come out all right in the end, the way it always had form him.

the shock of being the wife of a nobody might do tragic things.

That was the trouble with his book. It raised those questions, and was rejected. So he was ordered into public-relations duty.

These displaced people need something, and the clergy can’t give it to them—or it’s impossible for them to take what the clergy offers. The clergy says it’s enough, and so does the Bible. The people say it isn’t enough, and I suspect they’re right.

It isn’t knowledge that’s making trouble, but the uses it’s put to.

I drink because I’m scared—just a little scared, so I don’t have to drink much.

Anyway, Thoreau was in jail because he wouldn’t pay a tax to support the Mexican War. He didn’t believe in the war. And Emerson came to jail to see him. ‘Henry,’ he said, ‘why are you here?’ And Thoreau said, ‘Ralph, why aren’t you here?

You shouldn’t let fear of jail keep you from doing what you believe in.” “Well, it doesn’t.” Paul reflected that the big trouble, really, was finding something to believe in.

What’s his classification number?” said Halyard. “That’s just it. He hasn’t one.” “Then how can you call him a writer?” said Halyard. “Because he writes,” she said. “My dear girl,” said Halyard paternally, “on that basis, we’re all writers.” “Two days ago he had a number—W-441.” “Fiction novice,

Nuttiest thing I ever heard of,” said the President. “You have to punch out the questions on that thingamajig, and the answers come out on tape from the whatchamacallits. You can’t just talk to it.” A doubt crossed his fine face. “I mean, you can’t, can you?

And any man who cannot support himself by doing a job better than a machine is employed by the government, either in the Army or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps.

Perhaps a muffled wisp of the applause reached the ears of his wife, the woman who had had faith in him when no one else had, across the water, on the Mainland.

I’m doctor of cowshit, pigshit, and chickenshit,” he said. “When you doctors figure out what you want, you’ll find me out in the barn shoveling my thesis.

Make bread without a crust, if you want to.

Call the children, will you please, Edgar?” she said in a small, high voice. “Supper will be ready in twenty-eight seconds.

Nobody’s going to hurt you. These people are just your fellow Americans.” “Just because they were born in the same part of the world as I was, that doesn’t mean I have to come down here and wallow with them.

Now the machines take all the dangerous jobs, and the dumb bastards just get tucked away in big bunches of prefabs that look like the end of a game of Monopoly, or in barracks, and there’s nothing for them to do but set there and kind of hope for a big fire where maybe they can run into a burning building in front of everybody and run out with a baby in their arms.

If you are good," he said, "and if you are thoughtful, a fractured pelvis on the gridiron will pain you less than a life of engineering and management. In that life, believe me, the thoughtful, the sensitive, those who can recognize the ridiculous, die a thousand deaths.

If Anita was a great walker, it was news to Paul. He'd seen her drive a car to the house across the street from theirs, and she denied all the tenets of physical culture by remaining young and graceful while eating like a farmhand and conserving her strength like a princess. Bound feet and six inch fingernails wouldn't have restricted her activities in the least.

Player Piano B The Sirens of Titan A Mother Night A Cat’s Cradle A-plus God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A Slaughterhouse-Five A-plus Welcome to the Monkey House B-minus Happy Birthday, Wanda June D Breakfast of Champions C Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons C Slapstick D Jailbird A Palm Sunday C

What distinguishes man from the rest of the animals is his ability to do artificial things,” said Paul. “To his greater glory, I say. And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings,” said Paul, “not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.

Well—I think it’s a grave mistake to put on public record everyone’s I.Q. I think the first thing the revolutionaries would want to do is knock off everybody with an I.Q. over 110, say. If I were on your side of the river, I’d have the I.Q. books closed and the bridges mined.” “Then the 100’s would go after the 110’s, the 90’s after the 100’s, and so on,” said Finnerty. “Maybe. Something like that. Things are certainly set up for a class war based on conveniently established lines of demarkation. And I must say that the basic assumption of the present setup is a grade-A incitement to violence: the smarter you are, the better you are. Used to be that the richer you were, the better you were. Either one is, you’ll admit, pretty tough for the have-not’s to take. The criterion of brains is better than the one of money, but”—he held his thumb and forefinger about a sixteenth of an inch apart—“about that much better.” “It’s about as rigid a hierarchy as you can get,” said Finnerty. “How’s somebody going to up his I.Q.?

He knew with all his heart that the human situation was a frightful botch, but it was such a logical, intelligently arrived-at botch that he couldn’t see how history could possibly have led anywhere else.

For once, after the great bloodbath of the war, the world really was cleared of unnatural terrors—mass starvation, mass imprisonment, mass torture, mass murder. Objectively, know-how and world law were getting their long-awaited chance to turn earth into an altogether pleasant and convenient place in which to sweat out Judgment Day. Paul

Then you’ll do it brilliantly, darling. You’ll get to Pittsburgh yet.

Sooner or later someone’s going to catch the imagination of these people with some new magic. At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed on earth—hell, dignity. The police are bright enough to look for people like that, and lock them up under the antisabotage laws. But sooner or later someone’s going to keep out of their sight long enough to organize a following.” Paul

No trouble. There really isn’t a heck of a lot to the job.

Is Doctor Proteus on?” said Kroner’s secretary. “Doctor Kroner is in.” “Just a moment,” said Katharine. “Doctor Proteus, Doctor Kroner is in and will speak to you.” “All right, I’m on.” “Doctor Proteus is on the line,” said Katharine. “Doctor Kroner, Doctor Proteus is on the line.” “Tell him to go ahead,” said Kroner. “Tell Doctor Proteus to go ahead,” said Kroner’s secretary. “Doctor Proteus, please go ahead,” said Katharine. “This is Paul Proteus, Doctor Kroner. I’m returning your call.

A huge fireplace and Dutch oven of fieldstone filled one wall. Over them hung a long muzzle-loading rifle, powder horn, and bullet pouch. On the mantel were candle molds, a coffee mill, an iron and trivet, and a rusty kettle. An iron cauldron, big enough to boil a missionary in, swung at the end of a long arm in the fireplace, and below it, like so many black offspring, were a cluster of small pots. A wooden butter churn held the door open, and clusters of Indian corn hung from the molding at aesthetic intervals. A colonial scythe stood in one corner, and two Boston rockers on a hooked rug faced the cold fireplace, where the unwatched pot never boiled. Paul

go shoot a bear. Concentrating hard on the illusion, Paul was able to muster a feeling of positive gratitude for Anita’s presence, to thank God for a woman at his side to help with the petrifying amount of work involved in merely surviving.

The television cameras dollied and panned about him like curious, friendly dinosaurs, sniffing and peering.

Halyard yawned, and was annoyed to think that Lynn, who had just read “order out of chaos” as “order out of koze,” made three times as much money as he did. Lynn, or, as Halyard preferred to think of him, Planck, hadn’t even finished high school, and Halyard had known smarter Irish setters. Yet, here the son-of-a-bitch was, elected to more than a hundred thousand bucks a year!

And Halyard suddenly realized that, just as religion and government had been split into disparate entities centuries before, now, thanks to the machines, politics and government lived side by side, but touched almost nowhere.

She quieted, and turned away under his stare. Inadvertently, he’d gained the upper hand. He had somehow communicated the thought that had bobbed up in his thoughts unexpectedly: that her strength and poise were no more than a mirror image of his own importance, an image of the power and self-satisfaction the manager of the Ilium Works could have, if he wanted it. In a fleeting second she became a helpless, bluffing little girl in his thoughts, and he was able to feel real tenderness toward her.

It was a beautifully simple picture these procession leaders had. It was as though a navigator, in order to free his mind of worries, had erased all the reefs from his maps.

An awakening conscience, unaccompanied by new wisdom, made his life so damned lonely, he decided he wouldn’t much mind being dead.

Nobody’s so damn well educated that you can’t learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration.” “Yes, sir.

That’s pretty strong. I will say you’ve shown up what thin stuff clergymen were peddling, most of them. When I had a congregation before the war, I used to tell them that the life of their spirit in relation to God was the biggest thing in their lives, and that their part in the economy was nothing by comparison. Now, you people have engineered them out of their part in the economy, in the market place, and they’re finding out—most of them—that what’s left is just about zero. A good bit short of enough, anyway. My glass is empty.” Lasher sighed. “What do you expect?” he said. “For generations they’ve been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men—and boom! it’s all yanked out from under them. They can’t participate, can’t be useful any more. Their whole culture’s been shot to hell. My glass is empty.

The mansion was one more affirmation of Kroner’s belief that nothing of value changed; that what was once true is always true; that truths were few and simple; and that a man needed no knowledge beyond these truths to deal wisely and justly with any problem whatsoever.

Your conscience, dammit - doesn't it ever bother you?" "Why should it? I've never done anything dishonest." "Let me put it another way: do you agree things are a mess?" "Between us?" "Everywhere! The world!" She could be appallingly nearsighted. Whenever possible, she liked to reduce any generalization to terms of herself and persons she knew intimately. "Homestead, for instance." "What else could we possibly give the people that they haven't got?" "There! You made my point for me. You said, what else could we give them, as though everything in the world were ours to give or withhold." "Somebody's got to take responsibility, and that's just the way it is when somebody does." "That's just it: things haven't always been that way. It's new, and it's people like us who've brought it about. Hell, everybody used to have some personal skill or willingness to work or something he could trade for what he wanted. Now that the machines have taken over, it's quite somebody who has anything to offer. All most people can do is hope to be given something." "If someone has brains," said Anita firmly, "he can still get to the top. That's the American way, Paul, and it hasn't changed." She looked at him appraisingly. "Brains and nerve, Paul." "And blinders." The punch was gone from his voice, and he felt drugged, a drowsiness from a little too much to drink, from scrambling over a series of emotional peaks and pits, from utter frustration.

I could do with a little more dignity and maturity, because those are the things we're fighting for. But first of all we've got to fight, and fighting is necessarily undignified and immature

it's far easier to ask questions than to answer them.

The pride in strength and important mystery showed no less in the eyes of the sweepers than in those of the machinists and inspectors, and in those of the foreman, who alone was without a lunchbox. A

Better to be nothing than a blind doorman at the head of civilization’s parade. And

job left vacant two weeks ago by death—the managership of the Pittsburgh Works. “How gay can a party get?

Bodies lay everywhere, in grotesque attitudes of violent death, but manifesting the miracle of life in a snore, a mutter, the flight of a bubble from the lips.

archprophet

There’s something about war that brings out greatness. I

be true to yourself, and you can’t be false to anybody else, and

life seemed to be laid out like a golf course, with a series of beginnings, hazards, and ends, and with a definite summing up—for comparison with others scores—after each hole.

And Halyard suddenly realized that, just as religion and government had been split into disparate entities centuries before, now, thanks to the machines, politics and government lived side by side, but touched almost nowhere. He stared at President Jonathan Lynn and imagined with horror what the country must have been like when, as today, any damn fool little American boy might grow up to be President, but when the President had had to actually run the country!

postwar development of three thousand dream houses for three thousand families with presumably identical dreams.

It's fresh to you because you're too young to know anything but the way things are now.

Kind of summing up, seems like these days the engineers and managers and the like are everything, and the average man is just nothing any more.

It's the loneliness, the not belonging anywhere. I just about went crazy with loneliness here in the old days, and I figured things would be better in Washington, that I'd find a lot of people I admired and belonged with. Washington is worse, Paul - Ilium to the tenth power. Stupid, arrogant, self-congratulatory, unimaginative, humorless men. And the women, Paul - the dull wives feeding on the power and glory of their husbands.

The schism, like so many things, dated back to the war, when the economy had, for efficiency's sake, become monolithic. The question had arisen: who was to run it, the bureaucrats, the head of business and industry, or the military? Business and bureaucracy had stuck together long enough to overwhelm the military and has since then worked side by side, abusively and suspiciously, but, like Kroner and Baer, each unable to do a whole job without the other.

When I had a congregation before the war, I used to tell them that the life of their spirit in relation to God was the biggest thing in their lives, and that their part in the economy was nothing by comparison. Now, you people have engineered them out of their part in the economy, in the market place, and they're finding out - most of them - that what's left is just about zero. A good bit short of enough, anyway.

It isn't knowledge that's making trouble, but the uses it's put to

Ah tried, and didn't get past his secretary. Ah told her Ah was after a job, and she called up Personnel. They ran mah card through the machines while she held the phone; and then she hung up, and looked sad, and said Kroner had meetings all month...Bud was beyond help. As an old old joke had it, the machines had all the cards.

He [Finnerty] had a candor about his few emotional attachments that Paul found disquieting. He used words to describe his feelings that Paul could never bring himself to use when speaking of a friend: love, affection, and other words generally consigned to young and inexperienced lovers. It wasn't homosexual; it was an archaic expression of friendship by an undisciplined man in an age when most men seemed in moral fear of being mistaken for pansies for even a split second.

It's about as rigid a hierarchy as you can get,' said Finnerty. 'How's somebody going to up his I.Q.?' 'Exactly,' said Lasher. 'And it's built on more than just brain power - it's built on special kinds of brain power. Not only must a person be bright, he must be bright in certain approved, useful directions: basically, management or engineering.

...I must say that the basic assumption of the present setup is a grade-A incitement to violence: the smarter you are, the better you are. Used to be that the richer you were, the better you were. Either one is, you'll admit, pretty tough for the have-not's to take. The criterion of brains is better than the one of money, but' - he held up his thumb and forefinger about a sixteenth of an inch apart - 'about that much better.

As he shifted from one foot to the other, he recalled the fully mechanized saloon, he, Finnerty, and Shepherd had designed when they'd been playful young engineers. To their surprise, the owner of a restaurant chain had been interested enough to give the idea a try. They'd set up the experimental unit about five doors down from where Paul now stood, with coin machines and endless belt to do the serving, with germicidal lamps cleaning the air, with uniform, healthful light, with continuous soft music from a tape recorder, with seats scientifically designed by an anthropologist to give the average man the absolute maximum in comfort. The first day had been a sensation, with a waiting line extending blocks. Within a week of the opening, curiosity had been satisfied, and it was a book day when five customers stopped in. Then this place had opened up almost next door, with a dust-and-germ trap of a Victorian bar, bad light, poor ventilation, and an unsanitary, inefficient, and probably dishonest bartender. It was an immediate and unflagging success

He caught the bartender's eye at last. When the bartender saw Paul, he dropped his role of high-handed supervisor of morals and settler of arguments and became an obsequious host, like the bartender at the Country Club. Paul was afraid for a moment that he'd been recognized. But when the bartender failed to call him by name, he supposed that only his class had been recognized.

any man who cannot support himself by doing a job better than a machine is employed by the government, either in the Army or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps.

I'll bet not one person in fifty up north knows that. Just because the fact hasn't been promoted. Everything's promotion. Ever stop to think about that? Everything you think you think because somebody promoted the ideas.

The conductor's plain, like the lament of so many, wasn't that it was unjust to take jobs from men and give them to machines, but that the machines didn't do nearly as many human things as good designers could have made them do.

People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don't apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines.

In short, Paul missed what made his father aggressive and great: the capacity to really give a damn.

He was understanding now that no man could live without roots - roots in a patch of desert, a red clay field, a mountain slope, a rocky coast, a city street. In black loam, in mud or sand or rock or asphalt or carpet, every man had his roots down deep - in home.

That would be the third revolution, I guess—machines that devaluate human thinking. Some of the big computers like EPICAC do that all right, in specialized fields.” “Uh-huh,” said Katharine thoughtfully. She rattled a pencil between her teeth. “First the muscle work, then the routine work, then, maybe, the real brainwork.” “I hope I’m not around long enough to see that final step.