Kurt Vonnegut Quotes (234 Quotes)

I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. But they are murdered children all the same.

The brainless serenity of charwomen and janitors working late at night came over us. In a messy world we were at least making our little corner clean.

Let there be nothing harmonious about our children's playthings, lest they grow up expecting peace and order, and be eaten alive.

Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

The river was the Hudson. There were carp in there and we saw them. They were as big as atomic submarines. We saw waterfalls, too, streams jumping off cliffs into the valley of the Delaware.

Whereas the staff, of course, was devoted to the idea that weak people should be helped as much as possible, that nobody should die.

The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.

I can have oodles of charm when I want to.

The slaves were simply turned loose without any property. They were easily recognizable. They were black. They were suddenly free to go exploring.

I said I wasn't interested, and she was bright enough to say that she wasn't really interested either. As things turned out, we both overestimated our apathies, but not that much.

The fortifications have never been attacked, nor has any sane man ever proposed any reason why they should be attacked. They have never defended anything. Fourteen hundred persons are said to have died while building them. Of these fourteen hundred, about half are said to have been executed in public for substandard zeal.

The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art.

Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker!

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

The umpire had comical news. The congregation had been theoretically spotted from the air by a theoretical enemy. They were all theoretically dead now. The theoretical corpses laughed and ate a hearty noontime meal.

Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is.

The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.

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.

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

I want to congratulate librarians,...who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

the ideas in the piece seemed to make such great sense.

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.

Unexpected travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.

Thinking doesn't seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we've got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that's why you ought to be glad you're an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they're doing.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for an appreciable length of time.

You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism Iraq in cynical money-making. And there's no optimism or idealism now -- Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. We're proud of being ignorant that leaves virtue at our core. We aren't frazzled by knowledge like foreigners, so we can be trusted.

If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

not to believe my government.

I'm wild again, beguiled again, a wimpering, simpering child I am.

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.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

THE WINNERS ARE AT WAR WITH THE LOSERS, AND THE FIX IS ON. THE PROSPECTS FOR PEACE ARE AWFUL.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

It's a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.