Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Make war not on terrorism but on ignorance, on sickness and on environmental degradation.

The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.

The system promotes to the top those who don't care about the planet.

I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer.

Just in the nick of time they realized that it was their own habitat they were wrecking -- that they weren't merely visitors.

What the Gospels actually said was: don't kill anyone until you are absolutely sure they aren't well connected.

... life, by definition, is never still.

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.

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

You develop a style from writing a lot.

There is this feeling that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life.

Everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been.

Our government's got a war on drugs. That's certainly better than no drugs at all.

People like to feel entitled, whether they're actually entitled or not.

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

Be fruitful, and multiply.

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.

It's a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life.

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

I never asked to be born in the first place.

The little girls were wearing black party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice they were.

There is a strong feeling in the Middle West that the artist is not pulling his own weight no matter how hard he may work, that the other people are doing the real stuff.

In real life as in grand opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.

His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand—passive resistance and open displays of contempt.

What has been America's most nurturing contribution to the culture of this planet so far? Many would say jazz. I, who love jazz, will say this instead: Alcoholics Anonymous.

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.

1. Find a subject you care about. 2. Do not ramble, though. 3. Keep it simple. 4. Have the guts to cut. 5. Sound like yourself. 6. Say what you mean to say. 7. Pity the readers.

if there is a god, he sure hates people

Educate yourself, welcome life's messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.

I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for--to find out how much a man could take without breaking.

Vonnegut could not help looking back, despite the danger of being turned metaphorically into a pillar of salt, into am emblem of the death that comes to those who cannot let go of the past

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.

The big show is inside my head.

No moral value is greater than humanity.

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

God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train!

I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.

When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, "You think your dad's a good chemist? They're turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?

Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.

Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don't read much or think much -- who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could.

If you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington, D.C. I know a couple of bright seventh graders who would not be welcome in Washington D.C.

profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

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

Sons of suicides seldom do well.

The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possibly because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did.

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

My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.

Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.

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

He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so.