Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.
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I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read 'Democracy in America' by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.
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A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.
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Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
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Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.
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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.
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The band at the far end of the hall, amplified to the din of an elephant charge, smashed and hewed at the tune as though in a holy war against silence.
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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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During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school.
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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.
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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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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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The riot, then, was an exercise in science and theology-a seeking after clues by the living as to what life was all about.
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All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
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If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.
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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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The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.
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One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
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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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We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. I used to think that science would save us, and science certainly tried. But we can't stand any more tremendous explosions, either for or against democracy.
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'I can't help it,' I said. 'My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.''You and your what?' he said.'My soul and my meat,' I said.'They're separate?' he said.'I sure hope they are,' I said. I laughed. 'I would hate to be responsible for what my meat does.'
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And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.
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I figured things would be better in Washington, that I'd find a lot of people I admired and belonged with. Washington is worse, Paul-Ilium to the tenth power. Stupid, arrogant, self-congratulatory, unimaginative, humorless men. And the women, Paul-the dull wives feeding on the power and glory of their husbands.
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It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.