Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

After the First World War, Germany was trying to build a democracy. Then when the Reichstag, the legislature, was burned down in 1933, this was seen as such an emergency that human rights had to be suspended. The attack on the World Trade Towers has allowed Bush and his gang to do anything. What are we to do now? I say when there's a code red, we should all run around like chickens with our heads cut off. I don't feel that we are in any great danger.

Be patient, Ophelia. Love, Hamlet

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

You can't help it but you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed — so you were a good man just the same.

I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction.

The youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation.

You know who was a hero? Franklin Roosevelt.

Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.

In this world, you get what you pay for.

He became fubar in the classic way, which is to say that he was the victim of a temporary arrangement that became permanent.

All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.

The economy is a thoughtless weather system.

I wanted all things to seem to make some sense, So we could all be happy, yes, instead of tense. And I made up lies, so they all fit nice, and I made this sad world a paradise

Jokes have to be quite naked to be understood. They have to be quite simple.

Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns.

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.

Anyone unable to understand how useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.

I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash.

The city was blacked out because bombers might come, so Billy didn't get to see Dresden do one of the most cheerful things a city can do when the sun goes down, which is to wink its lights on one by one.

What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.

It posed the question posed by all such stone piles.: how had puny men moved stones so big? And, like all such stone piles, it answered the question itself. Dumb terror had moved those stones so big

It appeared to the Elders that the people here would believe anything about themselves, no matter how preposterous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings' heads that the whole Universe had been created by one big animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot of less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives of the Creator. The people down here just ate that up!

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 pity the Jews trying to get through life with only half a Bible. That's like trying to get from here to San Francisco with a road map that stops at Dubuque, Iowa.

You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too.

Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.

Be fruitful, and multiply.

Freud said he didn't know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to.

The Circle Theatre, black people had to sit in the balcony. Any theater with a balcony, black people had to sit up there. Black people couldn't check into any hotel except their own. And black people couldn't eat anywhere except in their own restaurants.

There is no good reason good can't triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the mafia.

We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one.

In 1844, Karl Marx said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." He said this at a time when opium and opium derivatives were the only painkillers. And he said it helped a little. He might as well have said, "Religion is the aspirin of the people."

I've been drawing all my life, just as a hobby, without really having shows or anything. It's just an agreeable thing to do, and I recommend it to everybody.

There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers.

Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting.

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren.

Well, it's an ancestral tribe. These were immigrants from north of Germany who came here about the time of the Civil War, but anyway, these people called themselves free thinkers. They were impressed, incidentally, by Darwin. They're called Humanists now; people who aren't so sure that the Bible is the Word of God.

Perhaps some people really are born unhappy. I surely hope not. Speaking for my sister and myself: We were born with the capacity and determination to be utterly happy all the time. Perhaps even in this we were freaks. Hi ho.

We were all gun nuts and they were called varmints, crows were, because they ate grain and so did we.

If I am ever put to death on the hook, expect a very human performance.

I just don't think people get off on language anymore. Language used to be an elevated art. It used to be for people what music can be. But people don't learn to do that anymore, so eloquence is merely a matter of waste. Who needs a good vocabulary and proper English? Eloquence - it's dead and who needs it?

If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.

I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

. . . but the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.

But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.