Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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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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Wars would be a lot better, I think, if guys would say to themselves sometimes 'Jesus - I'm not going to do that to the enemy. That's too much.'
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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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All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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 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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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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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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'All people are insane,' he said. 'They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.'
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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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Well, I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president.
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It is always pitiful when any human being falls into a condition hardly more respectable than that of an animal. How much more pitiful it is when the person who falls has had all the advantages!
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As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs.
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'Poo-Tee-Weet?'
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I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.