Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.

Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are.

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

What good is a planet called Earth, after all, if you own no land?

There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.

I don't reveal to her that I love her. I keep poker faced. She might as well be looking at a cantaloupe, there is so little information in my face, but my heart is beating.

A man without a home can't be lost.

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.

As Marilee and I were dressing, I whispered to her that I loved her with all my heart. What else was there to say? 'You don't. You can't,' she said.

If you can do no good, at least do no harm.

I go on many thrilling adventures and wondrous, profound escapades through books.

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.

But I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was all the saints I met, who could be anywhere. By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society.

He couldn't tell the difference between one politician and another. They were all formlessly enthusiastic chimpanzees to him.

Incidentally, I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the great science fiction writer and biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov. John Updike, who is religious, says I talk more about God than any seminarian. Socialism is, in fact, a form of Christianity, people wishing to imitate Christ.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.

You can only be funny if you have matters of great importance on your mind.

It's the emptiest and yet the fullest of all human messages: 'Good-bye.

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.

If I wrote something that hadn't really happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail. That's fraud!

This had been going on at Shortridge since 1906. My parents had also worked on the Shortridge Daily Echo. The way it came into being was that when they built Shortridge High School, they had a vocational department and they had a print shop.

The Chicago City News Bureau was a tripwire for all the newspapers in town when I was there, and there were five papers, I think. We were out all the time around the clock and every time we came across a really juicy murder or scandal or whatever, they'd send the big time reporters and photographers, otherwise they'd run our stories. So that's what I was doing, and I was going to university at the same time.

Don't put anything into a story that does not reveal character or advance the action.

It's incumbent on the President to entertain. Clinton did a better job of it - and was forgiven for the scandals, incidentally. Bush is entertaining us with what I call the Republican Super Bowl, which is played by the lower classes using live ammunition.

Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.

Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe.

A story has to be a good date, because the reader can stop at any time. Remember, readers are selfish and have no compulsion to be decent about anything.

Most things in this world don´t work, aspirin do.

Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided.

It's a terrible waste to be happy and not notice it.

My ancestors were Freethinkers - and that's what I am, except we're called secular humanists now.

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

...we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE

Any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.

If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, 'Kurt is up in heaven now.' That's my favorite joke.

Rabo Karabekian: I'm in the middle of a sentence. Circe Berman: Who isn't?.

Some automatic device clicked in her big brain, and her knees felt weak, and there was a chilly feeling in her stomach. She was in love with this man. They don't make memories like that anymore

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.

I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can't live without a culture anymore.

The people who taught really knew their stuff. My chemistry teacher, Frank Wade, was actually a chemist. I was so lucky in a number of ways.

Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness.

Cigarettes are a classy way to commit suiside.

You know, the Emancipation Proclamation was like giving freedom to domestic animals.

American Rifleman and Field & Stream had ads for "varmint guns." Another varmint was a ground hog because a horse would be going along and he'd stick his foot in a ground hog hole and break his leg. So we were trying to prevent that, too. But we finally scared ourselves. We didn't realize we were nuts.

Don't be reckless with other peoples hearts. And don't put up with people that are reckless with yours.

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.