Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
-
There is never a shortage anywhere of lawyers eager to attack the First Amendment, as though it were nothing more than a clause in a lease from a crooked slumlord.
-
I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.
-
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;Man got to tell himself he understand.
-
I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
-
The telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.
-
The new heroism - put a village idiot into a pressure cooker, seal it up tight, and shoot him at the moon.
-
I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.
-
I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.
-
Busy, busy, busy.
-
One of the great American tragedies is to have participated in a just war. It's been possible for politicians and movie-makers to encourage us we're always good guys. The Second World War absolutely had to be fought. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. But we never talk about the people we kill. This is never spoken of.
-
It is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln. He always steals the show.
-
I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.
-
If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.
-
I don't think there would be many jokes, if there weren't constant frustration and fear and so forth. It's a response to bad troubles like crime.
-
People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.
-
Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.
-
'I would say, ‘Is there anything I can do?’-but Skip once told me that that was the most hateful and stupid expression in the English language.'
-
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
-
The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth.
-
What is it, what can it possibly be about blowjobs and golf?
-
'All people are insane,' he said. 'They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.'
-
Science is magic that works.
-
I can think of no more stirring symbol of man’s humanity to man than a fire engine.
-
A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.