Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

The dog, who had sounded so ferocious in the winter distances, was a female German Shepherd. She was shivering. Her tail was between her legs. She had been borrowed that morning from a farmer. She had never been to war before. She had no idea what game was being played. Her name was Princess.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but the living room in your fortified compound.

Much of the conversation in the country consisted of lines from television shows, both past and present.

Teaching, may I say, is the noblest profession of all in a democracy.

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.

A lot of people were opposed to it. A lot of people were for it. I myself think about it as little as possible.

The death of a library, any library, suggests that the community has lost its soul.

The paintings by dead men who were poor most of their lives are the most valuable pieces in my collection. And if an artist wants to really jack up the prices of his creations, may I suggest this: suicide.

There were creative-writin g teachers long before there were creative-writin g courses, and they were called and continue to be called editors.

This person has just arrived on this planet, knows nothing about it, has no standards by which to judge it. This person does not care what it becomes. It is eager to become absolutely anything it is supposed to be.

The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who find those lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness. Science has nothing to do with it, friends.

He was talking about the sign that said 'THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.' 'All knew was that I didn't want my daughter or anybody's child to see a message that negative every time she comes into the library,' he said. 'And then I found out it was you who was responsible for it.' 'What's so negative about it?' I said. 'What could be a more negative word than "futility"?' he said. '"Ignorance,"' I said.

Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on.

I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in church quite a lot).

There was a still life on Billy's bedside table-two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes. Air was trying to get out of the dead water. Bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out.

If I were a physics teacher or a science teacher, it'd be on my mind all the time as how the hell we really got this way. It's a perfectly natural human thought and, okay, if you go into the science class you can't think this. Well, alright, as soon as you leave you can start thinking about it again without giving aid and comfort to the lunatic fringe of the Christian religion.

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

They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by. They were, I think, a flawless example of what Bokonon calls a duprass, which is a karass composed of only two persons.

...when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.

War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.

Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.

For some people, getting pregnant is as easy as catching cold." And there certainly was an analogy there: Colds and babies were both caused by germs which loved nothing so much as a mucous membrane.

Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow - whether there is a market for it or not! The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don't show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward.

...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.

Make love when you can. It's good for you.

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.

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

What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do.

Dr. Brainard Keyes Bullard, President of Wyandotte College, said in an address tonight that most of the worlds ills can be traced to the fact that Mans knowledge of himself has not kept pace with his knowledge of the physical world.

Do I resent rich people? No. The best or worst I can do is notice them. I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money.

All right - I'll tell you what you did for me: you went for happy, silly, beautiful walks with me.

The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they didn't use them for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get. So, in the interest of survival they trained themselves to be agreeing machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking and then they thought it too.

There were lots of things to stop and see-and then it was time to go, always time to go.

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.

Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.

You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do.

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.

A lover's a liar, To himself he lies, The truthful are loveless, Like oysters their eyes!

The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.

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.

In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me.

There is a riddle about a man who is locked in a room with nothing but a bed and a calendar, and the question is: How does he survive? The answer is: He eats dates from the calendar and drinks from the springs of the bed.

Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?

[People] want to feel superior, so they imagine we're Bible thumpers and uneducated and all that.

You know what truth is? [...] It's some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, "Yeah, yeah - ain't it the truth?

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.

Take it from somebody who has been around for a million years: When you get right down to it, food is practically the whole story every time.