4
" Your conscience, dammit - doesn't it ever bother you?"
"Why should it? I've never done anything dishonest."
"Let me put it another way: do you agree things are a mess?"
"Between us?"
"Everywhere! The world!" She could be appallingly nearsighted. Whenever possible, she liked to reduce any generalization to terms of herself and persons she knew intimately. "Homestead, for instance."
"What else could we possibly give the people that they haven't got?"
"There! You made my point for me. You said, what else could we give them, as though everything in the world were ours to give or withhold."
"Somebody's got to take responsibility, and that's just the way it is when somebody does."
"That's just it: things haven't always been that way. It's new, and it's people like us who've brought it about. Hell, everybody used to have some personal skill or willingness to work or something he could trade for what he wanted. Now that the machines have taken over, it's quite somebody who has anything to offer. All most people can do is hope to be given something."
"If someone has brains," said Anita firmly, "he can still get to the top. That's the American way, Paul, and it hasn't changed." She looked at him appraisingly. "Brains and nerve, Paul."
"And blinders." The punch was gone from his voice, and he felt drugged, a drowsiness from a little too much to drink, from scrambling over a series of emotional peaks and pits, from utter frustration. "
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Player Piano
