Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.
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'I wish I had been born a bird instead,' he said.'I wish we had all been born birds instead.'
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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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'You finally fell in love, I see,' said Salo.'Only an Earthling year ago,' said Constant. 'It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
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You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff. You're not expecting it.
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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.
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Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.
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Vietnam only made billionaires out of millionaires. Iraq is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.
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If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative. What could be simpler?
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You couldn't help that you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed - so you were a good man just the same.
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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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You know, in a way I wish I hadn’t met you two. It’s much more convenient to think of the opposition as a nice homogeneous, dead-wrong mass. Now I've got to muddy my thinking with exceptions.
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'We're having a celebration, so all sorts of things have been said which are not true,' I said. 'That's how to act at a party.'
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I have this theory about why men kill each other and break things. … Never mind. It's a dumb theory. I was going to say it was all sexual … but everything is sexual … but alcohol.
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War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.
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All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
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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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They're playin our song Gene!
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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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The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.
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These displaced people need something, and the clergy can’t give it to them-or it’s impossible for them to take what the clergy offers. The clergy says it’s enough, and so does the Bible. The people say it isn’t enough, and I suspect they’re right.
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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.'
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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.
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Well, I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president.