Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
'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.'
-
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
-
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.
-
If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.
-
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.
-
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!
-
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.
-
All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
-
They're playin our song Gene!
-
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.'
-
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.
-
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?
-
'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.'
-
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.
-
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.
-
1. Find a subject you care about.2. Do not ramble, though.3. Keep it simple.4. Have the guts to cut.5. Sound like yourself.6. Say what you mean to say.7. Pity the readers.
-
'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.'
-
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.
-
Well, I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president.