”The arts, the arts, the arts-” he said to me one night. “I don’t know why it took me so long to realize how important they are. As a young man, I actually held them in supreme contempt. Now, whenever I think about them, I want to fall on my knees and weep.”
…
“Howard-” he said to me, “future civilizations-better civilizations than this one-are going to judge all men by the extent to which they’ve been artists. You and I, if some future archaeologist finds our works miraculously preserved in some city dump, will be judged by the quality of our creations. Nothing else about us will matter.”
-Kurt Vonnegut, “Mother Night”
