Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.
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When I was a naive young recruit in Spain, I used to wonder why soldiers bayoneted oil paintings, shot the noses off statues and defecated into grand pianos. I now understand: it was to teach civilians the deepest sort of respect for men in uniform - uncontrollable fear.
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I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours.
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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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If facts weren't funny, or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.
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It was in the nature of truly effective good-luck pieces that human beings never really owned them.
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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.
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If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.
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It was a marvelous engine for doing violence to the spirit of thousands of laws without actually running afoul of so much as a city ordinance.
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When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.
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If I'd been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretly virtuous insides. So it goes.
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'Poo-Tee-Weet?'
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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.
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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.
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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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I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.
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What we will be seeking … for the rest of our lives will be large, stable communities of like-minded people, which is to say relatives. They no longer exist. The lack of them is not only the main cause, but probably the only cause of our shapeless discontent in the midst of such prosperity.
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Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
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And so on.
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I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.
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I wish one and all long and happy lives, no matter what may become of them afterwards. Use sunscreen! Don’t smoke cigarettes. Cigars, however, are good for you … Firearms are also good for you … Gunpowder has zero fat and zero cholesterol. That goes for dumdums, too.
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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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When you're dead you're dead.
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'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.'