Quote of the day, May 18 -- "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." - Kurt Vonnegut

This line comes from Kurt Vonnegut's 1962 novel Mother Night, where it appears as part of the author's stated moral of the story. The novel follows Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American who secretly works as a spy during World War II while publicly posing as a Nazi propagandist. Over time, his performance becomes so convincing that it begins to blur the line between his real identity and his constructed one.

The quote reflects a central idea in the novel: identity is not only shaped by what we believe internally, but also by what we repeatedly act out in the world. Vonnegut warns that the roles people adopt-even i...