Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.
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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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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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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.
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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 throw money at problems? That's what money is for.Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.
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His plan? To pass out weapons to slaves, so they could overthrow their masters. Suicide.
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Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.
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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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'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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While we were being bombed in Dresden, sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one slider said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, 'I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.' Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it.
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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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'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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There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.
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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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'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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Let us devote to unselfishness the frenzy we once gave gold and underpants.
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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.
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High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.
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Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to.
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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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What do I myself think of this particular book? I feel lousy about it, but I always feel lousy about my books.