Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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When the excrement hit the air conditioner (Recurring phrase throughout many chapters)
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We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding.
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You couldn't help that you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed - so you were a good man just the same.
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I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.
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So it goes.
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What we will be seeking … for the rest of our lives will be large, stable communities of like-minded people, which is to say relatives. They no longer exist. The lack of them is not only the main cause, but probably the only cause of our shapeless discontent in the midst of such prosperity.
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Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.
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The riot, then, was an exercise in science and theology-a seeking after clues by the living as to what life was all about.
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I have become an enthusiast for the printed word again. I have to be that, I now understand, because I want to be a character in all of my works. I can do that in print. In a movie, somehow, the author always vanishes. Everything of mine which has been filmed so far has been one character short, and that character is me.
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I figured things would be better in Washington, that I'd find a lot of people I admired and belonged with. Washington is worse, Paul-Ilium to the tenth power. Stupid, arrogant, self-congratulatory, unimaginative, humorless men. And the women, Paul-the dull wives feeding on the power and glory of their husbands.
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During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school.
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As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs.
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I can have oodles of charm when I want to.
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No grown woman is a fan of premature ejaculation.
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'I tell you, Mr. Constant,' he said genially, 'it’s a thankless job, telling people it’s a hard, hard Universe they’re in.'
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My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside.
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And so on.
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'Poo-Tee-Weet?'
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Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
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I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.
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We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. I used to think that science would save us, and science certainly tried. But we can't stand any more tremendous explosions, either for or against democracy.
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During the war, in hundreds of Iliums over America, managers and engineers learned to get along without their men and women, who went to fight. It was the miracle that won the war - production with almost no manpower. In the patois of the north side of the river, it was the know-how that won the war. Democracy owed its life to know-how.
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He was a graduate of West Point, a military academy which turned young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.
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Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.