Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

That’s the attractive thing about war,” said Rosewater. “Absolutely everybody gets a little something.

I'm mad about being old and I'm mad about being American. Apart from that, OK.

I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment."

She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

Don't put one foot in your job and the other in your dream, Ed. Go ahead and quit, or resign yourself to this life. It's just too much of a temptation for fate to split you right up the middle before you've made up your mind which way to go.

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.

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.

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.

All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States - and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!

I've got at least one tiny corner of the universe I can make just the way I want it.

I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better.

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.'

The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody.

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.

Terry Southern is the illegitimate son of Mack Sennett and Edna Saint Vincent Millay.

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

Of course, socialism is just evil now. It's completely discredited supposedly by the collapse of the Soviet Union, but I can't help noticing that my grandchildren are heavily in hock to Communist China now which is evidently a whole lot better at business than we are.

But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

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.

The Earthlings behaved at all times as though there were a big eye in the sky—as though that big eye were ravenous for entertainment.

Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don't stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect. Live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy. Get somebody to teach you to play a musical instrument.

I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch: everything stops.

Everything is nothing, with a twist.

The hopes and fears of all our years are here with us tonight.

She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].

We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

That is the first thing I know for sure: (1.) If the questions don't make sense, neither will the answers.

Everything of mine which has been filmed so far has been one character short, and that character is me.

Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.

You realize, of course, that everything I say is horseshit.

Harry closed his eyes. He never wanted to open them again. His heart sent this message to his molecules: "For reasons obvious to all of us, this galaxy is dissolved!

So let's give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That'll teach bin Laden a lesson he won't soon forget.

And I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

It's perfectly ordinary to be a socialist. It's perfectly normal to be in favor of fire departments.

One good thing about TV is, if you die violently, God forbid, on camera, you will not have died in vain because you will be great entertainment.

There's a Chaplain who never visited the front.

I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did.

I realize that some of you may have come in hopes of hearing tips on how to become a professional writer. I say to you, "If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

My ancestors came over from Germany about the time of the Civil War and one of them lost a leg and went back to Germany.

The complicated futility of ignorance.

She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.

I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a fire engine.

There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.

Hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide.