Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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Let us devote to unselfishness the frenzy we once gave gold and underpants.
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Hey - guess what: You're the only creature with free will. How does that make you feel?
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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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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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The lieutenant-colonel realized for the first time what most people never realize about themselves-that he was not only a victim of outrageous fortune, but one of outrageous fortune’s cruelest agents as well.
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I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.
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If God were alive today, he would have to be an atheist, because the excrement has hit the air-conditioning big time, big time.
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Pretend to be good always, and even God will be fooled.
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All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.
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'Why are you quitting?''Sick of my job.''Because what you were doing was morally bad?' suggested the voice.'Because it wasn’t getting anybody anywhere. Because it was getting everybody nowhere.''Because it was evil?' insisted the voice.'Because it was pointless.'
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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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His plan? To pass out weapons to slaves, so they could overthrow their masters. Suicide.
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Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did.
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'I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought , so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me!'
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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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There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.
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Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer people to find, was this:WE COULD HAVE SAVED ITBUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAPOnly he didn't say 'doggone.''
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History is merely a list of surprises. … It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again. Please write that down.
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Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.
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This silly playlet seemed to satisfy them completely as a picture of what they were doing, why they were doing it, and who was against them, and why some people were against them. It was a beautifully simple picture these procession leaders had. It was as though a navigator, in order to free his mind of worries, had erased all the reefs from his maps.
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People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.
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Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
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The new heroism - put a village idiot into a pressure cooker, seal it up tight, and shoot him at the moon.
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Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.