Kurt Vonnegut was an American author who wrote many novels, short stories, and plays. His work often contained elements of satire, black comedy, and science fiction. He is best known for his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which is considered a classic of 20th century literature. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Kurt Vonnegut on writing, love, war.
There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.
Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.
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.
There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look. — Kurt Vonnegut
There's a Chaplain who never visited the front. — Kurt Vonnegut
I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours. — Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Short Quotes
There's a Chaplain who never visited the front.
I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a fire engine.
Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes.
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
Maybe they invited me because they know I have a tuxedo
Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.
Having a yacht is a reason for being more cheerful than most.
I still catch myself feeling sad about things that don’t matter anymore.
A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes About Writing
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college. — Kurt Vonnegut
Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery. — Kurt Vonnegut
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages. — Kurt Vonnegut
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth. — Kurt Vonnegut
Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something. — Kurt Vonnegut
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia. — Kurt Vonnegut
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle. — Kurt Vonnegut
All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies. — Kurt Vonnegut
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of. — Kurt Vonnegut
If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. — Kurt Vonnegut
motivational quote by Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes About Love
There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look. — Kurt Vonnegut
There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time. — Kurt Vonnegut
And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is. — Kurt Vonnegut
Being an American means never having to say you're sorry. — Kurt Vonnegut
Don't be reckless with other peoples hearts. And don't put up with people that are reckless with yours. — Kurt Vonnegut
They do not love one another because they do not love themselves. — Kurt Vonnegut
Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier. — Kurt Vonnegut
Tis better to have love and lust Than to let our apparatus rust. — Kurt Vonnegut
As stupid and vicious as men are, this is a lovely day. — Kurt Vonnegut
Please — a little less love, and a little more common decency. — Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes About War
Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns. — Kurt Vonnegut
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. — Kurt Vonnegut
What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. — Kurt Vonnegut
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. — Kurt Vonnegut
An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. — Kurt Vonnegut
I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War. — Kurt Vonnegut
All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. — Kurt Vonnegut
He was a graduate of West Point, which is military academy that turns young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war. — Kurt Vonnegut
There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters. — Kurt Vonnegut
They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun... They were dressed half for battle, half for tennis or croquet. — Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes About Death
This country is being managed to death, being public related to death. — Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut could not help looking back, despite the danger of being turned metaphorically into a pillar of salt, into am emblem of the death that comes to those who cannot let go of the past — Kurt Vonnegut
The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death. — Kurt Vonnegut
With words alone, Gail Godwin has created an important piece of music about a love which death can only increase and deepen. Yes, and Frances Halsband's illustrations are a haunting countermelody. — Kurt Vonnegut
Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren. — Kurt Vonnegut
There is nothing like death to say what is always such an artificial thing to say: The End. — Kurt Vonnegut
I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway. — Kurt Vonnegut
The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was. — Kurt Vonnegut
No art is possible without a dance with death. — Kurt Vonnegut
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too. And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death. — Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes About Art
Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow. — Kurt Vonnegut
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. — Kurt Vonnegut
To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it. — Kurt Vonnegut
The canary bird in the coal mine theory of the arts: artists should be treasured as alarm systems. — Kurt Vonnegut
The arts are not a way to make a living. — Kurt Vonnegut
One thing I hate about school committees today is that they cut arts programs out of the curriculum because they say the arts aren't a way to make a living. — Kurt Vonnegut
You don't do art for any other reason than to help your soul grow. — Kurt Vonnegut
I'm convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins. — Kurt Vonnegut
I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It's as though I had taken over the family Esso station. — Kurt Vonnegut
People should practice an art in order to make their souls grow and not to make money or become famous. Paint a picture. Write. — Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes About Life
We'd been apart so long--I'd been dead so long," she said in English. "I thought surely you'd built a new life, with no room in it for me. I'd hoped that." "My life is nothing but room for you." I said. "It could never be filled by anyone but you. — Kurt Vonnegut
Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference. — Kurt Vonnegut
Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well? — Kurt Vonnegut
Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information. — Kurt Vonnegut
That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes. — Kurt Vonnegut
If this isn't nice, I don't know what is. — Kurt Vonnegut
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops. — Kurt Vonnegut
He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next — Kurt Vonnegut
How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is. — Kurt Vonnegut
To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life. — Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes About Time
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. — Kurt Vonnegut
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. — Kurt Vonnegut
Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away. — Kurt Vonnegut
When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. — Kurt Vonnegut
That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones. — Kurt Vonnegut
Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones. — Kurt Vonnegut
You are pooped and demoralised,” read Dwayne. “Why wouldn’t you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn’t meant to be reasonable. — Kurt Vonnegut
I've often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they're on, why they don't fall off it, how much time they've probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on. — Kurt Vonnegut
If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings," said the Tralfamadorian, "I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by 'free will.' I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will. — Kurt Vonnegut
Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. — Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes About Family
The youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation. — Kurt Vonnegut
People stopped calling themselves Freethinkers because it was so specifically German and anything German was terribly unpopular because of the two world wars. My family became Unitarians instead - it's the same sort of thing. — Kurt Vonnegut
I've written about Powers Hapgood. He was a Harvard graduate, son of a wealthy family who owned a cannery out there. After leaving Harvard, he went to work in coal mines and then was a CIO executive when I met him there, in Indianapolis. — Kurt Vonnegut
Our classes were relatively small. Those small classes can feel like family. After a class in French or chemistry or whatever, we'd be talking in the halls about what we just learned. — Kurt Vonnegut
I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that. — Kurt Vonnegut
It often is a terrible insult to some families if one of the kids turns out to be an artist and that's one way to really shake up the family if you haven't got nerve enough to turn into a homosexual. — Kurt Vonnegut
Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author. — Kurt Vonnegut
But anyway, it's obvious through human experience that extended families and tribes are terribly important. We can do without an extended family as human beings about as easily as we can do without vitamins or essential minerals. — Kurt Vonnegut
Powers Hapgood had just come from court because there was some kind of dust-up on a picket line. The judge was so curious about him - coming from a rich family - why he would choose to live as he had. I guess you know what his answer was ..."The Sermon on the Mount, sir." That's important. — Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes About Books
Because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs. So people pretend there is drama where there is none. — Kurt Vonnegut
A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. — Kurt Vonnegut
I go on many thrilling adventures and wondrous, profound escapades through books. — Kurt Vonnegut
I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on. — Kurt Vonnegut
Anyone unable to understand how useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either. — Kurt Vonnegut
The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries. — Kurt Vonnegut
There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers. — Kurt Vonnegut
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. — Kurt Vonnegut
There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore. — Kurt Vonnegut
The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: "Nothing. — Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes About Humorous
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. — Kurt Vonnegut
The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful. — Kurt Vonnegut
Humor is an almost physiological response to fear. — Kurt Vonnegut
And we all vied, in saving face, to be the greatest student of human nature, the person with the quickest sense of humor. — Kurt Vonnegut
I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian] — Kurt Vonnegut
Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be, to protect yourself. — Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes About People
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. — Kurt Vonnegut
Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own. — Kurt Vonnegut
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. — Kurt Vonnegut
The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, “To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls.” Another one said, “To describe blow-jobs artistically. — Kurt Vonnegut
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. — Kurt Vonnegut
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. — Kurt Vonnegut
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. — Kurt Vonnegut
Indianapolis, Indiana is the first place in the United States of America where a white man was hanged for the murder of an Indian. The kind of people who'll hang a white man for murdering an Indian--that's the kind of people for me. — Kurt Vonnegut
Beer, of course, is actually a depressant, but poor people will never stop hoping otherwise. — Kurt Vonnegut
Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people's blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed. — Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes About Science
Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules — and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress. — Kurt Vonnegut
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. I used to think that science would save us, and science certainly tried. But we can't stand any more tremendous explosions, either for or against democracy. — Kurt Vonnegut
What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I'm told. — Kurt Vonnegut
After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin? — Kurt Vonnegut
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. — Kurt Vonnegut
My ancestors were all Freethinkers, formerly Catholics. It was science and Darwin, in particular, that made them decide, as educated people, which they were, that the priest, nice as he was, didn't know what he was talking about. — Kurt Vonnegut
Science is magic that works. — Kurt Vonnegut
Where you can see tribal behavior now is in this business about teaching evolution in a science class and intelligent design. It's the scientists themselves are behaving tribally. — Kurt Vonnegut
I was clasified as a 'Science Fiction' writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady. — Kurt Vonnegut
I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see. — Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes About Living
Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy. — Kurt Vonnegut
All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental. — Kurt Vonnegut
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. — Kurt Vonnegut
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? — Kurt Vonnegut
Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales. — Kurt Vonnegut
If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still--if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice. — Kurt Vonnegut
Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead. — Kurt Vonnegut
I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living. — Kurt Vonnegut
If Jesus was alive today, we would kill him with lethal injection. I call that progress. We would have to kill him for the same reason he was killed the first time. His ideas are just too liberal. — Kurt Vonnegut
Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but the living room in your fortified compound. — Kurt Vonnegut
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. — Kurt Vonnegut
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. — Kurt Vonnegut
During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in - and which we lost - every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high. — Kurt Vonnegut
There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look. — Kurt Vonnegut
I don't know what's going on, and I'm probably not smart enough to understand if somebody was to explain it to me. All I know is we're being tested somehow, by somebody or some thing a whole lot smarter than us, and all I can do is be friendly and keep calm and try and have a nice time till it's over. — Kurt Vonnegut
Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did. — Kurt Vonnegut
Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end,
And our God will take things back that He to us did lend.
And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,
Why just go ahead and scold Him. He'll just smile and nod. — Kurt Vonnegut
We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should. — Kurt Vonnegut
Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead. — Kurt Vonnegut
The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, "There's a Chaplain who never visited the front. — Kurt Vonnegut
Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic. — Kurt Vonnegut
The words were a paraphrase of the suggestion of Jesus: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's." Bokonon's paraphrase was this: "Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on. — Kurt Vonnegut
I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours. — Kurt Vonnegut
Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done. — Kurt Vonnegut
Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears. — Kurt Vonnegut
Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all? — Kurt Vonnegut
Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne. — Kurt Vonnegut
Nietzsche had a little one-liner on how to choose a wife. He said, ''Are you willing to have a conversation with this woman for the next forty years?'' That's how to pick a wife. — Kurt Vonnegut
I could go on to speak of sanity as compared with insanity, decency as compared with vandalism, friendship as compared with rabies. — Kurt Vonnegut
About belief or lack of belief in an afterlife: Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort. I am a humanist, which mean, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead. — Kurt Vonnegut
There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time. — Kurt Vonnegut
There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia. — Kurt Vonnegut
...this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. — Kurt Vonnegut
Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place. — Kurt Vonnegut
Unusual travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God. — Kurt Vonnegut
I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. — Kurt Vonnegut
Hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide. — Kurt Vonnegut
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. — Kurt Vonnegut
The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest. — Kurt Vonnegut
Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand. — Kurt Vonnegut
Even as I speak, the very last polar bear may be dying of hunger on account of climate change, on account of us. And I sure miss the polar bears. Their babies are so warm and cuddly and trusting, just like ours. — Kurt Vonnegut
Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not. So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things. What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance. And all music is. — Kurt Vonnegut
The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. "Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?" she asked me. "The big show is inside my head," I said. — Kurt Vonnegut
There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. — Kurt Vonnegut
People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn't own doodley-squat, so they couldn't improve their surroundings. so they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead. — Kurt Vonnegut
Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way. — Kurt Vonnegut
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become. — Kurt Vonnegut
Men are jerks. Women are psychotic. — Kurt Vonnegut
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. — Kurt Vonnegut
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. — Kurt Vonnegut
Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas. — Kurt Vonnegut
I'm a doctor of cowshit, pigshit, and chickenshit.....when you doctors figure out what you want, you'll find me out in the barn shoveling my thesis. — Kurt Vonnegut
I would have been dead if it weren't for that great gift to civilization from the Chemistry Department of Harvard, which was napalm, or sticky jellied gasoline. — Kurt Vonnegut
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile. — Kurt Vonnegut
...Skyscraper National Park — Kurt Vonnegut
If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off. — Kurt Vonnegut
Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. — Kurt Vonnegut
Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes. — Kurt Vonnegut
A sane person to an insane society must appear insane. — Kurt Vonnegut
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward. — Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut speaking to John Irving while Irving was administering the Heimlich maneuver in response to Vonnegut's uncontrollable coughing..."John,stop- I am not choking. I have emphysema. — Kurt Vonnegut
And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet? — Kurt Vonnegut
The secret to success in any human endeavor is total concentration. — Kurt Vonnegut
All this happened, more or less. — Kurt Vonnegut
I apologize because of the terrible mess the planet is in. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any 'Good Old Days,' there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, 'Don't look at me. I just got here myself.' — Kurt Vonnegut
I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. 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. — Kurt Vonnegut
Roses are red, And ready for plucking, You're sixteen, And ready for high school. — Kurt Vonnegut
Life Lessons by Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut taught us to be kind and compassionate to those around us, no matter their differences. He also encouraged us to be mindful of our actions and to never forget to laugh at ourselves. Lastly, he showed us that it's important to think for ourselves and to challenge the status quo.
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