Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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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.
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This is Sunday, and the question arises, what'll I start tomorrow?
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Socialism is no more an evil word than Christianity. Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.
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I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see.
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Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.
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You are pooped and demoralized. Why wouldn't you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable.
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If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDEDFOR THE EXISTENCE OF GODWAS MUSIC
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True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
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Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.
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Sally In The Garden:Sally in the garden,Siftin' cinders,Lifted up her leg,And farted like a man,The bursting of her bloomers broke sixteen winders,The cheeks of her ass went (blam, blam, blam)
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In order to get what we've got, Anita, we have, in effect, traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them - the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect.
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When I'm being funny, I try not to offend. I don't think much of what I've done has been in really ghastly taste. I don't think I have embarrassed many people or distressed them.
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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 go right ahead and scold Him. He'll just smile and nod.
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I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
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'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.'
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Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milky Way - with a century of transportation whoopee.
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Back in my days as a chemistry student, I used to be quite a technocrat. I was firmly convinced that scientists would have cornered God and photographed Him in color by 1951.
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'Things don't stay the way they are,' said Finnerty. 'It's too entertaining to try to change them.'
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Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?
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Belief is nearly the whole of the Universe, whether based on truth or not.
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Why so many of us a million years ago purposely knocked out major chunks of our brains with alcohol from time to time remains an interesting mystery. It may be we were trying to give evolution a shove in the right direction - in the direction of smaller brains.
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All through the day I'm so confident. That's why I'm such a good salesman, you know? I have confidence, and I look like I have confidence, and that gives other people confidence.
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Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
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He ransacked his memory like a thief going through another man’s billfold.