Kurt Vonnegut Quotes (234 Quotes)

People would be surprised if they knew how much in this world was due to prayers.

This couple, so involved with babies, had never reproduced themselves, though they could have. This was an interesting comment on the whole idea of reproduction.

He watched and recorded their subversive activites with love, amusement, and detachment.

There was no question about it- the girl in the photograph was staggeringly beautiful. She was Miss Canal Zone, a runner-up in the Miss Universe Contest -- and in fact far more beautiful than the winner of the contests. Her beauty had frightened the judges.

Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings.

Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.

Anyone unable to understand how useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.

Mister, when I see my first lady angel, if God ever sees fit to show me one, it'll be her wings not her face that'll make my mouth fall open. I've already seen the prettiest face that ever could be.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.

I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.

Somewhere in the night there were cries of grief. With nothing better to do, Billy shuffled in their direction. He wondered what ragedy so many had found to lament out of doors.

This was a pretty girl, except she had legs like an Edwardian grand piano...

Her face ... was a one-of-a-kind, a surprising variation on a familiar theme - a variation that made observers think, Yes - that would be another very nice way for people to look. What Beatrice had done with her face, actually, was what any plain girl could do. She overlaid it with dignity, suffering, intelligence, and a piquant dash of bitchiness.

Unk had no way of judging the quality of the information contained in the letter. He accepted it all hungrily, uncritically. And, in accepting it, Unk gained an understanding of life that was identical with the writer's understanding of life. Unk wolfed down a philosophy.

Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead.

She was a defective child-bearing machine. She destroyed herself automatically while giving birth to Dwayne.

As stupid and vicious as men are, this is a lovely day.

My soul seemed a foul as smoke from burning cat fur.

You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everything-and I advise you to do the same.

Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn't see those causes at all, or even imagine them.

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm, and I can see I'm doing good, and them I'm doing good for know I'm doing it, and they love me, Unk, as best they can. I found me a home.

Unk, standing at a porthole, wept quietly. He was weeping for love, for family, for friendship, for truth, for civilization. The things he wept for were all abstractions, since his memory could furnish few faces or artifacts with which his imagination might fashion a passion play.

Fucking was how babies were made.

So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.

But people didn't have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.

No damn cat, and no damn cradle.

All people are insane. They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.

Billy Pilgrim, there in the creekbed, thought he, Billy Pilgrim, was turning to steam painlessly.

If I wrote something that hadn't really happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail. That's fraud!

The champagne was dead. So it goes.

Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.

I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

When you get right down to it, everybody's having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everyone. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much.

He couldn't tell the difference between one politician and another. They were all formlessly enthusiastic chimpanzees to him.

Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines.

Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are.

Dear Friends: As one who has experimented extensively with life in the home and community, using real people in true-life situations, I doubt that any playthings could prepare a child for one millionth of what is going to hit him in the teeth, ready or not.

Billy was guided by dread and the lack of dread. Dread told him when to stop. Lack of it told him when to move again.

It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.

The city was blacked out because bombers might come, so Billy didn't get to see Dresden do one of the most cheerful things a city can do when the sun goes down, which is to wink its lights on one by one.

We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

In short, on the basis of horse sense and the best scientific information, there was nothing good to be said for the exploration of space. The time was long past when one nation could seem more glorious than another by hurling some heavy object into nothingness.

You are going to do this voluntarily, Mr. Constant, so that the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent can have a drama of dignified self-sacrifice to remember and ponder through all time.

He wanted to talk to them, if he could, to discover whether they had truths about life which he had never heard before. Here is what he hoped new truths might do for him: enable him to laugh at his troubles, to go on living, and to keep out of the North Wing of the Midland County General Hospital, which was for lunatics.

Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe.