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You couldn't help that you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed — so you were a good man just the same.

— Kurt Vonnegut Jailbird (1979)

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Good and Evil

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

Maybe God has let everybody who ever lived be reborn — so he or she can see how it ends.

Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970)

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Mother Night (1962)

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

Mother Night (1962)

Belief is nearly the whole of the Universe, whether based on truth or not.

Bluebeard (1987)

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.

Player Piano (1952)

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False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Socrates

I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.

Edward Teller

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

C. S. Lewis God in the Dock (1970)

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

Henry David Thoreau Walden (1854)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Kurt Vonnegut (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.