It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.

It’s embarrassing to tell you this, but it seems to come down mostly to just learning to be kinder.

Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always try to be a little kinder than is necessary?

Always try to be a little kinder than is necessary.

Sometimes it seems the only people willing to give advice in a relativistic society are those with the least to offer.

I learned, too, while I was groping for more and more effective ways of trying to cope with community and national and world problems, that you can accomplish a great deal more if you care deeply about what is happening to other people than if you say in apathy or discouragement, “Oh, what can I do? What use is one person? I might as well not bother.” Actually I suppose the caring comes from being able to put yourself in the position of the other person. If you cannot imagine, “This might happen to me,” you are able to say to yourself with indifference, “Who cares?” I think that one of the reasons it is so difficult for us, as a people, to understand other areas of the world is that we cannot put ourselves imaginatively in their place. We have no famine. But if we were actually to see people dying of starvation we would care quite

The problem with people is that they're only human.

I am no longer as inspired by expertise as I once was. Perhaps the worth of any lifetime is measured more in kindness than in competency.

Until you have done something for humanity,” wrote the great American educator Horace Mann, “you should be ashamed to die.

There is certainly no hope left of getting away. And it isn't even terrible; it's possibly funny, if even that. It's embarrassing. That's all. A little embarrassing to realize that I no longer control my life, that the major decisions have already been made, long before I was conscious that any change was occurring.

So it is that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give or maybe we don't like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed.

There’s only one rule I know of: You’ve got to be kind.” — Kurt Vonnegut

Be kind, because everyone is having a really hard time.

"Now anybody can be "kind." And everybody's supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn't help. Now it's just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class."