Thinking doesn’t seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: The Mind, Mind
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. “
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Love
I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Earth
About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.
—Kurt Vonnegut
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Knowledge
We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: World
We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.
—Kurt Vonnegut
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. … .
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Writing
I’d rather have written “Cheers” than anything I’ve written.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Reality, Opportunities
Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Illusion
The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn’t really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: “he wasn’t going to compose Beethoven’s Fifth.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: The Military
The secret to success in any human endeavor is total concentration.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Focus, Concentration
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?
—Kurt Vonnegut
There’s only one me, and I’m stuck with him.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Self-love
I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled “Science Fiction” and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Science Fiction
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to have without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Racism
Be careful what you pretend to be, because you are what you pretend to be.
—Kurt Vonnegut
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.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Community, Loneliness
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion … . I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
—Kurt Vonnegut
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.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Learning, Caution
Unusual travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Travel
Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Dance, Dancing
There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we’ve got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that’s why you ought to be glad you’re an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they’re doing.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: America
I can think of no more stirring symbol of man’s humanity to man than a fire engine.
—Kurt Vonnegut
We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. Only in superstition is there hope. If you want to become a friend of civilization, then become an enemy of the truth and a fanatic for harmless balderdash.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Superstition
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Age, Class
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 nutcases want to be president.
—Kurt Vonnegut
It was a thunderingly beautiful experience—voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Space
Einstein’s E=mc2 is an extraordinary concept. So radical: matter and energy are two phases of the same sort of general stuff. There’s only one other idea that radical: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Forgiveness
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Robert Anton Wilson American Polymath
- Philip Roth American Novelist, Short-story Writer
- Gore Vidal American Novelist
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Robert A. Heinlein American Science Fiction Writer
- David Foster Wallace American Novelist, Essayist
- Marge Piercy American Poet
- Henry Miller American Novelist
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- William S. Burroughs American Novelist
Leave a Reply