Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

What a bummer it is to be a human being.

Tis better to have love and lust Than to let our apparatus rust.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.

Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is.

There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

We have such a young culture that there is an opportunity to contribute wonderful new myths to it, which will be accepted.

The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow.

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

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.

Pretend to be good always and even God will be fooled.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed

The canary bird in the coal mine theory of the arts: artists should be treasured as alarm systems.

The world is too serious. To get mad at a work of art-because maybe somebody, somewhere is blowing his stack over what I've done-is like getting mad at a hot fudge sundae.

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

It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.

Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

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

The world is full of people who are very clever at seeming much smarter than they really are.

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

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.

The arts are not a way to make a living.

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

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.

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.

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

What is the purpose of life?...To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool!

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

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

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

A society is only as healthy as its ideas are humane.

Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me.

Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn't - no matter when, no matter what.

How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

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.

To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.

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

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

Don't worry about your father. He's a perfectly contented, self-sufficient zombie.

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

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.

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

You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too. And you've got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.

Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.

The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.

I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.

Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple years back by the wife of our President: "Just say no.

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.