Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.

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

Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;Man got to tell himself he understand.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

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?

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

If somebody says 'I love you' to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? 'I love you, too'.

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.

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.

Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. "Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

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

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?

We are what we imagine ourselves to be.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.... It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.

There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

You hate America, don't you?' That would be as silly as loving it,' I said. 'It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.

You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.

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.

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

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

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

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

During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.

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

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.