No Evidence Kurt Vonnegut Said Society ‘Wouldn’t Save Itself Because It Wasn’t Cost-Effective’

For years, internet users have shared a quote about society refusing to save itself due to the perceived costs of doing so, attributing the saying to Kurt Vonnegut, the author of satirical novels including “Cat’s Cradle” and “Slaughterhouse-Five.”

As quoted in posts on social media platforms including X (archived), Facebook (archived), and Reddit (archived), the full quip 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)

Some internet users wondered whether Vonnegut ever actually said these words. For example, responding to a December 2024 post that had received around 34,000 upvotes at the time of this writing, one Reddit user wrote (archived): “Does anyone know where this quote comes from? It seems to be attributed to multiple people at different sources, but it’s never directly cited.”

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 from 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 more 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 the author and environmental journalist Donella Meadows, who died in 2001. For evidence, these users 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. We’ve reached out to the Donella Meadows Project, an organization that maintains a website about Meadows’ life and work, to ask if they are aware of any evidence linking the quote to Meadows, and will update this story if and when they respond.

Ultimately, we found no concrete evidence 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 from 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 did make.

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. For that reason, we’ve rated this claim as unproven, meaning we’ve investigated the available evidence and were unable to arrive at a true or false determination.