Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.
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'During my next visit with you, fellow-believers,' he said, 'I shall tell you a parable about people who do things that they think God Almighty wants done. In the meanwhile, you would do well, for background on this parable, to read everything that you can lay your hands on about the Spanish Inquisition.'
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The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.
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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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Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.
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People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.
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The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, 'There's a Chaplain who never visited the front.'
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Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be.
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And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.
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What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish that people wouldn’t get so mad at them.
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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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Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.
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He held up his watch to sunlight, letting it drink in the wherewithal that was to solar watches what money was to Earth men.
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There is a riddle about a man who is locked in a room with nothing but a bed and a calendar, and the question is: How does he survive?The answer is: He eats dates from the calendar and drinks water from the springs of the bed.
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Maybe God has let everybody who ever lived be reborn - so he or she can see how it ends. Even Pitecanthropus erectus and Australopithecus and Sinanthropus pekensis and the Neanderthalers are back on Earth - to see how it ends. They're all on Times Square - making change for peepshows. Or recruiting Marines.
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I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
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You were sick, but now you're well, and there's work to do.
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Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals.
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To bethe eyesand earsand conscienceof the Creator of the Universe,you fool.
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He was too good a soldier to go around asking questions, trying to round out his knowledge.A soldier’s knowledge wasn’t supposed to be round.
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This theory argues that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.
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Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.
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Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?
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I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves 'Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.'