Galapagos

          "The mass of men were quietly desperate because the infernal computers inside their skulls were incapable of restraint or idleness; were forever demanding more challenging problems which life could not provide."



          "Need I tell you that this once beautiful and nourishing planet when viewed from the air now resembles the diseased organs of poor Roy Hepburn when exposed at his autopsy, and that the apparent cancers, growing for the sake of growth alone, and consuming all and poisoning all, are the cities of your beloved human beings?
Like the people on this accursed ship, my boy, they are led by captains who have no charts or compasses, and who deal from minute to minute with no problem more substantial than how to protect their self-esteem."



          "Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galápagos Islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next -- and on and on."



          "There was still plenty of food and fuel and so on for all the human beings on the planet, as numerous as they had become, but millions upon millions of them were starting to starve to death now. The healthiest of them could go without food for only about forty days, and then death would come.
          And this famine was as purely a product of oversize brains as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
It was all in people's heads. People had simply changed their opinions of paper wealth, but, for all practical purposes, the planet might as well have been knocked out of orbit by a meteor the size of Luxembourg"

          "What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain. That cumbersome computer could hold so many contradictory opinions on so many different subjects all at once, and switch from one opinion or subject to another one so quickly, that a discussion between a husband and wife under stress could end up like a fight between blindfolded people wearing roller skates.

The Hiroguchis, for example, whose susurrations Mary had heard through the back of her closet, were then changing their opinions of themselves and each other, and of love and sex and work and the world and so on, with lightning speed.

In one second, Hisako would think that her husband was very stupid, and that she was going to have to rescue herself and her female fetus. But then in the next second she would think that he was as brilliant as everybody said he was, and that she could just stop worrying, that he would get them out of this mess very easily and soon.

In one second *Zenji was inwardly cursing her for her helplessness, for being such a dead weight, and in the next he was vowing in his head to die, if necessary, for this goddess and her unborn daughter.

Of what possible use was such emotional volatility, not to say craziness, in the heads of animals who were supposed to stay together long enough, at least, to raise a human child, which took about fourteen years or so?"

All quotes from "Leon Trotsky Trout" aka Kurt Vonnegut.