Did Kurt Vonnegut Say Society ‘Wouldn’t Save Itself Because It Wasn’t Cost-Effective’?

In January 2025, social media users on platforms including X (archived) and Threads (archived) shared a quote about society refusing to save itself due to the perceived costs of doing so. They attributed the saying to Kurt Vonnegut, the author of satirical novels including “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Cat’s Cradle.”

The full quote read: “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.”

(Facebook page English Literature)

The quote has circulated for years on X (archived), Facebook (archived), and Reddit (archived) with the alleged Vonnegut credit. However, some internet users wondered whether he actually said the phrase.

In short, there was no demonstrable evidence that Vonnegut ever said this exact quote, which made its earliest securely datable appearance online (archived) in 2011, four years after Vonnegut’s death. However, Vonnegut did use similar language to express the same general idea on at least two occasions.

Christopher Lafave, the curator of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis, Indiana, said over email that he had attempted to locate a source for the quote “on a few occasions” and had never found any concrete evidence proving the words originated with Vonnegut.

However, Vonnegut did express similar sentiments in other quotes that are securely attested — that is, for which there is demonstrable primary-source evidence.

An example Lafave pointed to, from Vonnegut’s 2005 novel “A Man Without a Country,” was: “The good Earth — we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.”

Vonnegut made an even similar statement to a New York Times reporter in 1989, as an X user pointed out (archived) in 2023. In that article, Vonnegut listed issues including “the number of forests wiped out in Europe” and “the kids with no education here” before saying: ”No one’s going to do anything about it. The planet won’t be saved. It wouldn’t be cost effective to do so.”

Some (archived) social media users have claimed (archived) the quote under investigation here was part of a speech Vonnegut delivered at the University of Oregon in 1990. However, no direct evidence of such a speech appeared in the online finding aid for the collection of Vonnegut’s papers at Indiana University Bloomington’s Lilly Library.

Likewise, we found no mention of any 1990 Vonnegut speech or lecture in the archives of the Daily Emerald, the University of Oregon’s student newspaper.

Other archived internet users have asserted (archived) that the quote “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective” was in fact the work of author and environmental journalist Donella Meadows, who died in 2001. For evidence, these users have sometimes pointed toward the quote’s inclusion on Meadows’ Goodreads profile. (Goodreads, it’s worth noting, allows users to submit quotes to the website’s database without proof of the quotes’ authenticity.)

We were unable to find the quote in any of Meadows’ published work. A representative for the Donella Meadows Project, an organization that maintains a website about Meadows’ life and work, confirmed over email that the organization was unaware of any demonstrable evidence linking the quote to Meadows.

Ultimately, we found no concrete proof that the quote “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective” originated with Vonnegut — at least in the exact form in which it circulated on social media.

However, Vonnegut did on multiple occasions express similar sentiments using similar language. It’s possible that the quote’s association with Vonnegut stemmed from internet users misremembering or paraphrasing statements he genuinely made.

On the other hand, it’s also possible that primary-source evidence proving that Vonnegut actually did at some point use this exact phrasing will eventually emerge.

Sources