from "Galapagos"

by Kurt Vonnegut

Does it trouble me to write so insubstantially, with air on air? Well -- my words will be as enduring as anything my father wrote, or Shakespeare wrote, or Beethoven wrote, or Darwin wrote. It turns out that they all wrote with air on air, and I now pluck this thought of Darwin's from the balmy atmosphere:

Progress has been much more general than retrogression.

'Tis true, 'tis true.