> This is open to unfortunate misuse, when Vonnegut’s sweet-natured voice gets ripped out of the context of the fiction and rendered down into fridge-magnet poe

> This is open to unfortunate misuse, when Vonnegut’s sweet-natured voice gets ripped out of the context of the fiction and rendered down into fridge-magnet poetry and social media banalities. (Run a Google search for images of his 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr Rosewater and you’ll first find pictures not of the cover or author, but of grotesquely bucolic wall prints bearing a line untimely ripp’d from the book: “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”) Not sure where the author sourced this contempt. The google image search yielded only pictures of the book, but even if it had given the magnets, so what? It's a lovely little anecdote from a great character considering a baptism speech. The full text goes: “Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” Words to live by.