Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.

If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.

Think of what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.

It's a small world. When you put it in a cemetery, it is.

The highest possible form of treason is to say that Americans aren’t loved wherever they go, whatever they do.

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?

That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

People who are wary of what they might find in a book if they opened one are right to be.

Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.

Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be.

Women are so useless and unimaginative, aren't they? All they ever think of planting in the dirt is the seed of something beautiful or edible. The only missile they can ever think of throwing at anybody is a ball or a bridal bouquet.

If it weren't for the people always getting tangled up with the machinery... Earth would be an engineer's paradise.

Son--they say there isn't any royalty in this country, but do you want me to tell you how to be king of the United States of America? Just fall through the hole in a privy and come out smelling like a rose.

I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares how we are or what we do.

egregious. most people think that word means terrible or unheard of or unforgivable. it has a much more interesting story than that to tell. it means "outside the herd." imagine that - thousands of people, outside the herd.

The most racist, nastiest act by America, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki. Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away yellow men, women, and children. I'm glad I'm not a scientist because I'd feel so guilty now.

The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC.

We are America's Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup.

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.

No matter how wonderful a sentence is, if it doesn't add new and useful information, it should be removed.

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

During the Vietnam War, Abbie Hoffman announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if this was true or not.

[Ayres] was our city because we were building it. That's how I felt when I walked around town.

For a Russian to be chivalrous with an American is a spiritual impossibility, a conradiction in terms.

Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.

One thing in the Middlewest: If you're in my business you're aware of the low opinion both coasts have of the midlands. And that is quite mistaken. New York would be a Kokomo if it weren't for Middlewesterners coming there.

Everything about life is a joke. Don't you know that?

I don't think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they're talking about the secrets they've been told or haven't been told. They're talking about intimate things, family things, love things," that nice old lady said to me. "Mr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren't the main things with him.

This is a nation tragedy, of course - that we've changed from a society to an audience.

I still catch myself feeling sad about things that don’t matter anymore.

Just because you can read, write and do a little math, doesn't mean that you're entitled to conquer the universe.

They tell him that there is no why, since the moment simply is and since all of them are trapped in the moment, like bugs in amber.

They like life alright, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime.

Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.

Let there be nothing harmonious about our children's playthings, lest they grow up expecting peace and order, and be eaten alive.

That’s the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind.

The heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality and the heartbreaking impossibilty of lying about it

The other American divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks.

Somebody realized, hey, students are printing dummy ads and dummy news stories, why don't they really print something. So there was the Shortridge Daily Echo, and a hell of a lot of writers have come out of Shortridge on that account. The head writer of the I Love Lucy show, Madelyn Pugh, was a schoolmate of mine. Dan Wakefield. Writing was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.

Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.

The polls demonstrate that 50 percent of Americans who get their news from TV think Saddam Hussein was behind the Twin Towers attack. Man, have they got ways for getting half-truths out right away now, thanks to TV! I think TV is a calamity in a democracy.

Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.

Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass.

Mark Twain was so good with crowds that he became, in competition with singers and dancers and actors and acrobats, one of the most popular performers of his time. It is so unusual, and so psychologically unlikely, too, for a great writer to be a great performer, too.

The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again. There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling I had to believe whatever clocks said -and calendars.

It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can't get out of, but I think this is very usual in life.

The secret to success in any human endeavor is total concentration.