“Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.”
More from Kurt Vonnegut on Philosophy
“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”
“Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because the moment simply is.”
“I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.”
“It's embarrassing to be human.”
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
“I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with”
“And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.”
“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.”
“Pretend to be good always and even God will be fooled.”
“Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?”
Others on Philosophy
Ludwig Wittgenstein
22 quotes“The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.”
Christopher Hitchens
22 quotes“How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of...”
Nietzsche
22 quotes“One does not hate as long as one has a low esteem of someone, but only when one esteems him as an equal or a superior.”
Carl Jung
21 quotes“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
Immanuel Kant
20 quotes“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”
Heraclitus
19 quotes“All things flow nothing abides.”
H. L. Mencken
17 quotes“We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”
C.S. Lewis
15 quotes“[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
14 quotes“Consciousness is man's greatest misfortune, still I know that man loves it and will not exchange it for any satisfaction...”
Samuel Beckett
14 quotes“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
Napoleon
14 quotes“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.”
Isaac Asimov
13 quotes“Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.”