My favorite quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater:
[The ex-con] was a quiet, cynical, resentful man. He had never thanked Eliot for anything. Eliot was neither hurt nor startled. He was used to ingratitude. One of his favorite Kilgore Trout books dealt with ingratitude and nothing else. It was called, “The First District Court of Thankyou,” which was a court you could take people to, if you felt they hadn’t been properly grateful for something you had done. If the defendant lost his case, the court gave him a choice between thanking the plaintiff in public, or going into solitary confinement on bread and water for a month. According to Trout, eighty per cent of those convicted chose the black hole.