Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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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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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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How embarrassing to be human.
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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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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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Well, I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president.
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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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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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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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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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'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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And so on.
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During the war, in hundreds of Iliums over America, managers and engineers learned to get along without their men and women, who went to fight. It was the miracle that won the war - production with almost no manpower. In the patois of the north side of the river, it was the know-how that won the war. Democracy owed its life to know-how.
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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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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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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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We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
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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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I can think of no more stirring symbol of man’s humanity to man than a fire engine.
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Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
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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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I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.
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Roses are redAnd ready for pluckingYou're sixteenAnd ready for high school.