A rich man attempts a noble experiment with human nature. The result is an etched-in-acid portrayal of universal greed, hypocrisy, and follies of the flesh.
“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.”
“"Sylvia, I'm going to be an artist.""An Artist?""I am going to love these discarded Americans even though they are useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art."”Eliot Rosewater
“I love you sons of bitches. You’re all I read any more. You're the only ones who’ll talk all about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstanding, mistakes, accidents, catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.”Eliot Rosewater
“Pretend to be good always, and even God will be fooled.”
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers — joined in the serious business of keeping our food, shelter, clothing and loved ones from combining with oxygen.”
“Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did”
“And don't play God to people, or they will slobber all over you, take you for everything they can get, break commandments just for the fun og being forgiven - and revile you when you are gone.”Mary Kilgore
“That she was exactly as poor and dull as Fred was a possibility she was constitutionally unable to entertain.”
“I think it's terrible the way people don't share things in this country. I think it's a heartless government that will let one baby be born owning a big piece of the country, the way I was born, and let another baby be born without owning anything. The least a government could do, it seems to me, is to divide things up fairly among the babies.”Eliot Rosewater
Profanity: mild, seldom.Violence: Referred to in sections discussing war - nothing graphicSex: mild references to pubic areas, nothing specific or graphic
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