Kurt Vonnegut Quotes (234 Quotes)


    Bush used that line recently. I should sue him for plagiarism.

    If somebody says, ''I love you,'' to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires ''I love you, too. ''

    We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

    Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.

    People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.



    It was a thunderingly beautiful experience -- voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.

    Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

    We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. Only in superstition is there hope. If you want to become a friend of civilization, then become an enemy of the truth and a fanatic for harmless balderdash.

    It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.

    Well, to admire the hell out of Jesus Christ or of everyone who speaks well. And, well my grandfather said is-- if-- what Jesus said was marvelous. What does it matter whether he was God or not And it doesn't matter. So this is a human being who spoke extremely well, and we humanists listened.


    How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

    I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.

    Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly Man got to sit and wonder, 'Why, why, why' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land Man got to tell himself he understand.


    To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

    I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

    If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

    But doing that job, surviving it, was like getting a Purple Heart. I wouldn't have missed it for anything.

    Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are.

    Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

    There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.

    I told him that if we doubted that we are demons in Hell, he should read The Mysterious Stranger, which Mark Twain wrote in 1898, long before the First World War (1914-1918). In the title story he proves to his own grim satisfaction, and to mine as well,

    What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.

    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.

    We would have said the Nazis were evil in any event, since we had decided to fight them. This has always been the style in war, until very recently...in order that we can be frenzied on the battlefield. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that our German enemies really were satanic this time...We had fought something which was totally obscene.This was very bad for us... One idea put into our heads was that our enemies were so awful, so evil, that we, by contrast, must be remarkably pure. That illusion of purity...has become our curse today.

    You had to get everything exactly right or the editors would give you hell.

    Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God.

    About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

    We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to as a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.

    Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

    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.

    Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?


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