American author, and satirist Kurt Vonnegut has died. He was 84.

Most famous for his great anti-war novel Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut authored 14 other novels, mainy of them works of social criticism. Vonnegut was a harsh critic of war, American imperialism, scientific expertise, and the general miserable behavior of most human beings. He was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and the American Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom, rational thought and scientific skepticism, made him its honorary president. He was a merciless critic of George W. Bush and the current American government.

Vonnegut was a native Hoosier who spent most of his life in New York State.

What follows is an excerpt from Vonnegut's novel Breakfast of Champions. Add some of your own favorite Vonnegut quotes in the comments below.

"A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless education, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well.

"But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:

"1492

"The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

"Here was another piece of evil nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom to human beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of an ice-cream cone on fire.

"Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines."

---Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions