Hello babies. Welcome to earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—:“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

Vonnegut gives this benediction-like address in his 1973 novel *God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater*, a satire of American wealth, philanthropy, and moral responsibility. The line is presented as a plainspoken message to “babies,” echoing the book’s recurring concern with what obligations the comfortable owe to the vulnerable. Written after Vonnegut’s rise to prominence in the late 1960s, the novel channels his characteristic blend of dark humor and humanism: a world that is physically uncomfortable, socially crowded, and morally compromised, yet still navigable by a single, stubborn ethical imperative—kindness.

The passage compresses Vonnegut’s worldview into a mock-sermon: life is brief, materially indifferent, and often harsh (“hot…cold…crowded”), so grand metaphysical systems are less useful than a simple ethic of care. By addressing “babies,” Vonnegut strips away status and ideology, treating everyone as equally fragile newcomers. The profanity functions as emphasis and sincerity—an impatient insistence that kindness is not sentimental but necessary. In the context of *Mr. Rosewater*, it also critiques a society that rationalizes cruelty through economics or class, proposing kindness as the one rule that can’t be outsourced or excused.

1) “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth.” (capitalization/punctuation variant)
2) “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” (often quoted alone)
3) “There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” (dash/colon variants)