AkaSci 🛰️AkaSci@fosstodon.org
Nov 11, 2026, 11:44 AMHappy Birthday Kurt Vonnegut (Nov 11, 1922 – Apr 11, 2007).
"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
If we are wounded by an ugly idea, we must count it as part of the cost of freedom and, like American heroes in the days gone by, bravely carry on.
When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’
God damn it, you’ve got to be kind."
![Simple graphic with words from the article -
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy [...] all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.
-- Breakfast of Champions (1973)](https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/117/598/486/580/685/041/original/25404f32845753d0.png)
