Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

'You go up to a man, and you say, ‘How are things going, Joe?’ And he says, ‘Oh fine, fine-couldn’t be better.’ And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn’t be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody’s having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much.'

Kurt Vonnegut

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Quotes to Explore

• Since the moment I could hold a pencil, I have spent nearly all day every day writing. And there is not an age group that I have not written for. You can read me from birth 'til death.

  

  Kate Forsyth
  • Writing
  • Age
  • Death

• Is the button white or orange or green or yellow? Does it say 'sell', or 'sell now', or 'on sale' or 'for sale'? You test, you test, you test and most of the ideas you try fail and so I would argue I failed my way to success.

  

  Fabrice Grinda
  • Success
  • Ideas
  • Green

• I studied neuroscience at the cellular level, so I was looking at learning and memory in the visual cortex of rats. Neuroscience mainly exposed me to a way of thinking - about experimentation, about what you believe to be true and how you could prove it - and how to approach things in a methodical manner.

  

  Ze Frank
  • Believe
  • Thinking
  • True

• I went to the Technion and studied with Avram Hershko. I found it more exciting than practicing medicine.

  

  Aaron Ciechanover
  • More
  • Medicine
  • Practicing

• I doubt there's any government in the world that guides itself primarily by strategy or conceptual documents or worldview. Anybody who has the reins of power has to look at practical limitations and tradeoffs - the fact that you can focus at most on one or two things at a time, that resources are limited.

  

  Barton Gellman
  • Time
  • World
  • Power

• Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon's unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals.

  

  Walt Disney
  • Different
  • Job
  • Language

• Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday, I made philosophy my life's work.

  

  Karl Jaspers
  • Life
  • Work
  • Birthday

• The true measure of success for the U.N. is not how much we promise, but how much we deliver for those who need us most.

  

  Ban Ki-moon
  • True
  • Success
  • Promise

• As a poet, I would always hear emcees come up to me and say, 'Yo, you should rap,' and I was like, 'No.' You know, the label was tough for me. I'm a poet. I was proud of that distinction between the two, not wanting to be the other.

  

  Omari Hardwick
  • Up
  • Me
  • Proud

• The woman who has her being in marriage and motherhood has become part of antithetical reality, revoking property from the woman who remains in a condition of intangible femininity.

  

  Rachel Cusk
  • Reality
  • Marriage
  • Woman

• I always see where I didn't do things the right way. I only see the heavy lifting. That's a bit of my wisdom, if you want to call it that.

  

  Vera Wang
  • Want
  • Wisdom
  • Always

• I would love to go back and help rebuild that country and help - you know, kind of like what's going on with Iraq right now. You know, they've got a new government in place. They're trying to rebuild the country. I would love for that to happen in Cuba also.

  

  Rafael Palmeiro
  • Country
  • Trying
  • Love

• Money is neither my god nor my devil. It is a form of energy that tends to make us more of who we already are, whether it's greedy or loving.

  

  Dan Millman
  • God
  • Money
  • Energy

• I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.

  

  Umberto Eco
  • Writing
  • Book
  • Attention

• On a professional side, you've got a tough problem to fix, Geoff Miller's going to do it, and he's always going to do it to very high standards, and he's always going to be on the side of right. He's always talking about 'what right looks like' - just a phrase he would always use.

  

  Jack Keane
  • High
  • Problem
  • Professional

• I just want to play for Hindus and Muslims that sit together. That's all I want to do.

  

  Zubin Mehta
  • Together
  • Want
  • Just

• I am primarily concerned with the condition of man.

  

  Jack Levine
  • Man
  • Condition

• What you see is what you get.

  

  Van Morrison
  • You
  • See
  • Get

• I realized that the world did not exist for my benefit. It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn't up to me. It was clear that the best thing to do was to adopt a sort of muddled cheerfulness.

  

  Banana Yoshimoto
  • Up
  • World
  • Benefits

• My mom was always saying: 'Be whatever you want to be, but stick with it. Don't waver. Don't change who you are for anybody.'

  

  Miranda Lambert
  • Mom

• I thought that if acting didn't work out, I'd have done law school or medical school: probably law to be honest.

  

  Jesse Williams
  • Work
  • School
  • Done

• A lot of the Indians who came to North America in the '70s, and who made very successful adjustments, always had an idea of the India that they had left, not realizing that the India that they had left has changed more profoundly than the America they came to.

  

  Clark Blaise
  • America

• I love Tom Cruise. I've been a Tom Cruise fan for a long time.

  

  Courtney B. Vance
  • Time
  • Long

• 'You go up to a man, and you say, ‘How are things going, Joe?’ And he says, ‘Oh fine, fine-couldn’t be better.’ And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn’t be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody’s having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much.'

  

  Kurt Vonnegut
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