Top 100 Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
#1. You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books? I say 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?
Kurt Vonnegut
#2. Of course I love you, So let's have a kid. Who will say exactly What its parents did; "Of course I love you, So let's have a kid. Who will say exactly What its parents did; 'Of course I love you, So let's have a kid Who will say exactly What its parents did -'" Et cetera. -NOBLE CLAGGETT (1947-1966)
Kurt Vonnegut
#3. And the winner of the drawing that night was an eleven-year-old black girl named Dorothy Daffodil-7 Garland.
Kurt Vonnegut
#4. I shouldn't be held responsible for my acts, since I was a political idiot, an artist who could not distinguish between reality and dreams
Kurt Vonnegut
#5. High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.
Kurt Vonnegut
#7. I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.
Kurt Vonnegut
#8. Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.
Kurt Vonnegut
#9. If he had been a dog in a city, a policeman would have shot him and sent his head to a laboratory, to see if he had rabies. So it goes.
Kurt Vonnegut
#10. You know - we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. 'My God, my God - ' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.
Kurt Vonnegut
#11. Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.
Kurt Vonnegut
#12. Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected.
Kurt Vonnegut
#13. He remembered his cry of the night before: We must meet in the middle of the Bridge!
Kurt Vonnegut
#14. Trout said this about all the stories he had torn to pieces and flushed down toilets or tossed into trash-strewn vacant lots, or whatever: 'Easy come, easy go.
Kurt Vonnegut
#15. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Kurt Vonnegut
#16. If you want to find a Granfalloon, remove the skin from a toy balloon.
Kurt Vonnegut
#17. I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.
Kurt Vonnegut
#18. Don't worry about your father. He's a perfectly contented, self-sufficient zombie.
Kurt Vonnegut
#19. I am an American by birth, a Nazi by reputation, and a nationless person by inclination
Kurt Vonnegut
#20. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay, LL. D.
Kurt Vonnegut
#21. It's the writer's job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all.
Kurt Vonnegut
#22. Time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only with the electric clocks, but the wind-up kind, too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.
Kurt Vonnegut
#23. My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.
Kurt Vonnegut
#24. She was a defective child-bearing machine. She destroyed herself automatically while giving birth to Dwayne.
Kurt Vonnegut
#25. Don't put one foot in your job and the other in your dream, Ed. Go ahead and quit, or resign yourself to this life. It's just too much of a temptation for fate to split you right up the middle before you've made up your mind which way to go.
Kurt Vonnegut
#26. We are all experiments in enthusiasms, narrow and preordained.
Kurt Vonnegut
#27. As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs.
Kurt Vonnegut
#28. Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.
Kurt Vonnegut
#29. The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn't see those causes at all, or even imagine them.
Kurt Vonnegut
#30. It shook up Trout to realize that even he could bring evil into the world - in the form of bad ideas.
Kurt Vonnegut
#31. Live while you live, when you're dead you're dead.
Kurt Vonnegut
#32. During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.
Kurt Vonnegut
#33. A walk?" said Catharine.
"One foot in front of the other," said Newt, "through leaves, over bridges
Kurt Vonnegut
#34. The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.
Kurt Vonnegut
#35. As Bokonon says: 'peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from god.
Kurt Vonnegut
#36. Forever searching for love in forms it never exists, places it can never be
Kurt Vonnegut
#37. Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.
Kurt Vonnegut
#38. Maybe I did hurt him, but I don't think I could have hurt him much. He was one of the best-protected human beings who ever lives. People couldn't get at him because he just wasn't interested in people.
Kurt Vonnegut
#39. There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.
Kurt Vonnegut
#40. It is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln. He always steals the show.
Kurt Vonnegut
#41. Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.
Kurt Vonnegut
#42. The whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition. It's always men against women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves.
Kurt Vonnegut
#43. What rioters, out of control, are really protesting about is life itself. Most people do not like it, it's humiliating for almost everyone.
Kurt Vonnegut
#44. Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes.
Kurt Vonnegut
#45. As for children's working off aggressions, I'm against it. They are going to need all the aggressions they can contain for ultimate release in the adult world. Name one great man in history who did not go boiling and bubbling through childhood with a lashed-down safety valve.
Kurt Vonnegut
#46. Best thunderclap came from Spengler, to the effect that science is either true or false, art is either shallow or deep. Second best came from some Supreme Court Justice, Jackson, I think, to the effect that one man's right to swing his fists stops where another man's nose begins.
Kurt Vonnegut
#47. I myself grew up when radio was very important. I'd come home from school and turn on the radio. There were funny comedians and wonderful music, and there were plays. I used to pass time with radio.
Kurt Vonnegut
#48. In 1844, Karl Marx said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." He said this at a time when opium and opium derivatives were the only painkillers. And he said it helped a little. He might as well have said, "Religion is the aspirin of the people."
Kurt Vonnegut
#49. As far as I'm concerned," said Constant, "the Universe is a junk yard, with everything in it overpriced. I am through poking around in the junk heaps, looking for bargains. Every so-called bargain," said Constant, "has been connected by fine wires to a dynamite bouquet.
Kurt Vonnegut
#50. Science never cheered up anyone. the human situation is just too awful.
Kurt Vonnegut
#51. But anyway, it's obvious through human experience that extended families and tribes are terribly important. We can do without an extended family as human beings about as easily as we can do without vitamins or essential minerals.
Kurt Vonnegut
#52. I never knew a writer's wife who wasn't beautiful.
Kurt Vonnegut
#53. Cigarettes are a classy way to commit suiside.
Kurt Vonnegut
#54. They say the first thing to go when you're old is your legs or your eyesight. It isn't true. The first thing to go is parallel parking.
Kurt Vonnegut
#55. Another woman told Constant what it was the crowd felt it had a right to. 'We have a right to know what's going on!' she cried.
Kurt Vonnegut
#56. Just because something feels better than anything else," he said in his thoughts, "that don't mean it's good for you.
Kurt Vonnegut
#57. I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.
Kurt Vonnegut
#58. I go on many thrilling adventures and wondrous, profound escapades through books.
Kurt Vonnegut
#59. It's a small world." ... "When you put it in a cemetery it is.
Kurt Vonnegut
#60. For all the sublimity of the cause for which we fought, we surely created a Belsen of our own. The method was impersonal, but the result was equally cruel and heartless. That, I am afraid, is a sickening truth.
Kurt Vonnegut
#61. Billy coughed when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit thin gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton. This law tells us that for every action there is a reaction and opposite in direction.
This can be useful in rocketry.
Kurt Vonnegut
#62. Billy got off his lounge chair now, went into the bathroom and took a leak. The crowd went wild.
Kurt Vonnegut
#63. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.
Kurt Vonnegut
#64. One foot in front of the other - through leaves, over bridges, said Newt.
Kurt Vonnegut
#65. Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be, to protect yourself.
Kurt Vonnegut
#66. He hadn't killed nearly as many people as I had. But then again, he hadn't had my advantage, which was the full cooperation of our Government.
Kurt Vonnegut
#67. Society is more concerned with material possessions than it is with the true love and compassion of another human being.
Kurt Vonnegut
#68. Screw you, Jasper," said Castle mildly, "and screw Mother's Day and Christmas, too.
Kurt Vonnegut
#69. Socrates talks to an old duffer about what old age is like. The old duffer says in effect (I can't put my hands on the book just now) that he feels as though he'd been freed from a cruel and unreasonable master.
Kurt Vonnegut
#70. The riot, then, was an exercise in science and theology - a seeking after clues by the living as to what life was all about.
Kurt Vonnegut
#71. Einstein's E=mc2 is an extraordinary concept. So radical: matter and energy are two phases of the same sort of general stuff. There's only one other idea that radical: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Kurt Vonnegut
#72. That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.
Kurt Vonnegut
#73. The hopes and fears of all our years are here with us tonight.
Kurt Vonnegut
#74. The reason we write fiction is because it's so much easier to exist spending part of each day in an imaginary world.
Kurt Vonnegut
#75. What has three eyes,
three nipples and two assholes?
Kurt Vonnegut
#76. Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end,
And our God will take things back that He to us did lend.
And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,
Why just go ahead and scold Him. He'll just smile and nod.
Kurt Vonnegut
#77. I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much.
Kurt Vonnegut
#78. Her smile was glassy, and she was ransacking her mind for something to say, finding nothing in it but used Kleenex and costume jewelry.
Kurt Vonnegut
#79. That's the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind.
Kurt Vonnegut
#80. Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics
Kurt Vonnegut
#81. I could ask him anything, and six seconds would pass, and then he would give me a perfect answer, gruffly, almost a growl. He was born in Romania, in a house where, according to him, the geese looked in the windows.
Kurt Vonnegut
#82. For a Russian to be chivalrous with an American is a spiritual impossibility, a contradiction in terms
Kurt Vonnegut
#83. Never trust a survivor," my father used to warn me, with Vartan Mamigonian in mind, "until you find out what he did to stay alive.
Kurt Vonnegut
#84. Maybe they invited me because they know I have a tuxedo
Kurt Vonnegut
#85. The artist makes his living by pretending, by putting it in a meaningful hole though no such holes exist.
Kurt Vonnegut
#86. Just in the nick of time they realized that it was their own habitat they were wrecking
that they weren't merely visitors.
Kurt Vonnegut
#87. Nobody nowadays, I must say, expects to be rescued from anything, once he or she is more than nine months old. That's how long human childhood lasts nowadays. ***
Kurt Vonnegut
#88. The Gospels actually taught this:
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. so it goes.
Kurt Vonnegut
#89. He had had no experience in asking for a job with a big organization, and Mr. Dilling was making him aware of what a fine art it was
if you couldn't run a machine. A duel was under way.
Kurt Vonnegut
#90. Truth can be really powerful stuff if you're not expecting it.
Kurt Vonnegut
#92. Somewhere a dog barked. With the help of fear and echoes and winter silences, that dog had a voice like a big bronze gong.
Kurt Vonnegut
#93. So tell me the secret so I can take it back to Earth and save us all: How can a planet live at peace?
Kurt Vonnegut
#94. And what does an anthropologist do these days?" sad Paul.
"Same thing a supernumerary minister does
becomes a public charge, a bore, or possibly a rum-dum, or a bureaucrat.
Kurt Vonnegut
#95. To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.
Kurt Vonnegut
#96. Very few plays would work well with an altar as a fixed centerpiece.
Kurt Vonnegut
#97. Nim-nim was a banana-like fruit on Booboo. An immature
Kurt Vonnegut
#98. All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.
Kurt Vonnegut
#99. He had a penis one inch in diameter and seven and a half inches long. During the past year, he had averaged twenty-two orgasms per month. This was far above the national average. His income and the value of his life insurance policies at maturity were also far above average.
Kurt Vonnegut
#100. This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed.
Kurt Vonnegut
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