Kurt Vonnegut attended Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, Indiana, and he worked on the school newspaper: The Daily Echo. He was proud of both facts. Asked “Where did you get your radical ideas?” Mr. Vonnegut replied, “The public schools of Indianapolis.” His first wife, Jane Marie Cox, extended his education. She was a Phi Beta Kappa and taught a Great Books course; on their honeymoon, she made him read Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. He also learned from the Indianapolis News humorist Kin Hubbard, who wrote, “It’s no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.”

Kurt Vonnegut felt that the idea of the four seasons is wrong. He said, “Spring doesn’t feel like Spring a lot of time, and November is all wrong for Fall and so on.” He proposed six seasons. Spring is May and June. Summer is July and August. Fall is September and October. Locking, aka Shutting Down, is November and December. Winter is January and February. Unlocking, aka Starting Up, is March and April. He added that believing in six seasons is optional, not mandatory.

Kurt Vonnegut believed that 12 words by Jesus were enough for Him to be called the Prince of Peace: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” He also believed that if people believed in those words and acted accordingly, we could say goodbye to the words “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.”

Asked by Forbes magazine about his favorite technologies, Kurt Vonnegut said that they were “a corner mailbox, my address book, and the Encyclopedia Britannica. The Britannica is arranged alphabetically, so you can find out all kinds of stuff, if you know your ABCs.”

Kurt Vonnegut made a number of graduation speeches, writing a new speech for each ceremony — with some overlap, of course. In all or most of the speeches, he talked about his Uncle Alex. Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “One of the things he found objectionable in human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when they were happy.” Uncle Alex himself tried to recognize when he was happy. At such times, he would say, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t what is.” Such times included “drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime.”

Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse-Five, and Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, attended a party thrown by someone with billions of dollars. Mr. Vonnegut said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to realize that only yesterday our host probably made more money than Catch-22, one of the most popular books of all time, has grossed worldwide over the past forty years?” Mr. Heller replied, “I have something he can never have.” Mr. Vonnegut asked, “What’s that?” Mr. Heller answered, “The knowledge I have enough.”

Powers Hapgood came from a middle-class family and graduated from Harvard, but he worked as a coal miner to learn about conditions in the mines. Eventually, he became an officer in the CIO in Indianapolis, Indiana. Following trouble during a protest, he found himself in court as a witness and the judge asked why such a privileged person was doing the work he did. Mr. Hapgood replied, “Why, the Sermon on the Mount, sir.” He also once said, “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal class, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Becoming well educated is difficult, and the desire and effort to become well educated reveals the depths of our ignorance. Many of us have puddles of knowledge and oceans of ignorance. Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “One of the most brilliant human beings of all time, George Bernard Shaw, said on his 75th birthday or so that he knew enough at last to become an ignorant office boy.”

What makes life worth living? Should we bring children into this world? Author Kurt Vonnegut once got a letter from a woman asking if it was OK to bring children into this world. Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “I told her that what made life almost worth living for me was the saints I met. These were people who behaved compassionately and capably, no matter what, and they could be anywhere.”

“No matter how corrupt and greedy our government and our corporations and our media and Wall Street and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be perfectly wonderful.” — Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut wrote that he wanted this to be his epitaph: “THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC.”

Kurt Vonnegut’s biological son, a pediatrician named Dr. Mark Vonnegut, said this sentence that is often attributed to Kurt (without the word “father”), “Father, we are here to help others to get through this thing, whatever it is.”

“My politics in a nutshell: Let’s stop giving corporations and newfangled contraptions what they need and get back to giving human beings what we need.” — Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut commented that the information revolution is “the astonishing fact that human beings can actually know what they’re talking in case they want to try it.”