Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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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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If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.
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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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'Poo-Tee-Weet?'
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Busy, busy, busy.
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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 was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.
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Science is magic that works.
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Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?
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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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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.
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When you're dead you're dead.
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I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.
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How embarrassing to be human.
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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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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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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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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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Anita had the mechanics of marriage down pat, even to the subtlest conventions. If her approach was disturbingly rational, systematic, she was thorough enough to turn out a credible counterfeit of warmth.
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'I liked him very much,' said Constant.'The insane, on occasion, are not without their charms,' said Beatrice.
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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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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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The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.
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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.