Kurt Vonnegut Quotes & Sayings

The whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition. It's always men against women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves. — Kurt Vonnegut

I will say further, as an officer of an enormous international conglomerate, that nobody who is doing well in this economy ever even wonders waht is really going on.
We are chimpanzees. We are orangutans. — Kurt Vonnegut

Life has left no marks on him, because he hasn't paid much attention to it. — Kurt Vonnegut

I think, therefore I am, therefore I am photographable. — Kurt Vonnegut

What you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations — Kurt Vonnegut

When, late in the war, with the Wehrmacht breaking up on all fronts, our planes were sent to destroy this last major city, I doubt if the question was asked, "How will this tragedy benefit us, and how will that benefit compare with the ill-effects in the long run?" Dresden, a beautiful city, built in the art spirit, symbol of an admirable heritage, so anti-Nazi that Hitler visited it but twice during his whole reign, food and hospital center so bitterly needed now - plowed under and salt strewn in the furrows. — Kurt Vonnegut

People should practice an art in order to make their souls grow and not to make money or become famous. Paint a picture. Write. — Kurt Vonnegut

You can only be funny if you have matters of great importance on your mind. — Kurt Vonnegut

Luck is the way the wind swirls and the dust settles eons after God has passed by. — Kurt Vonnegut

They gave Pandora a box. Prometheus begged her not to open it. She opened it. Every evil to which human flesh is heir came out of it.
The last thing to come out of the box was hope. It flew away. — Kurt Vonnegut

Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead. — Kurt Vonnegut

Billy switched on a floor lamp. The light from the single source threw the baroque detailing of Montana's body into sharp relief. Billy was reminded of fantastic architecture in Dresden, before it was bombed. — Kurt Vonnegut

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. — Kurt Vonnegut

I want a military funeral when I die-the bugler, the flag on the casket, the ceremonial firing squad, the hallowed ground ... It will be a way of achieving what I've always wanted more than anything-something I could have had, if only I'd managed to get myself killed in the war ... The unqualified approval of my community. — Kurt Vonnegut

If I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice. — Kurt Vonnegut

Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way. — Kurt Vonnegut

Any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today. — Kurt Vonnegut

Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician. — Kurt Vonnegut

Socialism is, in fact, a form of Christianity, people wishing to imitate Christ. — Kurt Vonnegut

Who ever told you a Chinaman was a coloured man? — Kurt Vonnegut

Like the college professor he was, Kittredge groped only for big words, and, finding no apt ones, he coined a lot of untranslatable new ones. — Kurt Vonnegut

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that. — Kurt Vonnegut

It's done with ink on a piece of paper. That girl isn't lying there on the counter. She's thousands of miles away, doesn't even know we're alive. If this was a real girl, all I'd have to do for a living would be to stay home and cut out pictures of big fish. — Kurt Vonnegut

I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable - and therefore understood. — Kurt Vonnegut

Someday son all this will be yours. Father and son atop a garbage dump. — Kurt Vonnegut

When we went to war, we had two fears. One was that we'd get killed. The other was that we might have to kill someone. Imagine somebody coming back from the Gulf, particularly a pilot, saying, "Gee, I'm lucky. I didn't have to kill anybody." TV has dehumanized us to the point where this is acceptable. — Kurt Vonnegut

Our close cousins the gorillas and orangs and chimps and gibbon apes have gotten along just fine all this time while eating raw vegetable matter, whereas we not only prepare hot meals but have now all but destroyed this once salubrious planet as a life-support system in fewer than two hundred years, mainly by making thermodynamic whoopee with fossil fuels. — Kurt Vonnegut

I'm afraid I don't read as much as I ought to," said Maggie.
"We're all afraid of something," Trout replied. "I'm afraid of cancer and rats and Doberman pinschers. — Kurt Vonnegut

The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged, I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad. And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors, and they are squeamish about technology to this very day. So it is natural for them to despise science fiction. — Kurt Vonnegut

It is a common experience among jailbirds to wake up and wonder why they are in jail — Kurt Vonnegut

I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases. — Kurt Vonnegut

Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy's wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference." Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future. — Kurt Vonnegut

Constant, having just heard from Rumfoord that he was to be mated to Rumfoord's wife on Mars, looked away from Rumfoord to the museum of remains along one wall. — Kurt Vonnegut

No man who achieved greatness in the arts operated by himself; he was top man in a group of like-minded individuals. — Kurt Vonnegut

Popular as he was as a graduation speaker, Vonnegut never graduated from college. — Kurt Vonnegut

Kar.a.bek.i.an (n.); (from Rabo Karabekian, U.S. 20th Cent. painter). Fiasco in which a person causes total destruction of own work and reputation through stupidity, carelessness or both. — Kurt Vonnegut

Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go around looking for it, and I think it can be poisonous. I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, 'Please - a little less love, and a little more common decency'. — Kurt Vonnegut

But you're not going to write it that way, are you." This wasn't a question. It was an accusation. "I - I don't know," I said. "Well, I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs." So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. — Kurt Vonnegut

Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become ridiculous. — Kurt Vonnegut

Sooner or later, Chrono believed, the magical forces of the Universe would put everything back together again. They always did. — Kurt Vonnegut

Smoking is the only honorable form of suicide. — Kurt Vonnegut

Never index your own book. — Kurt Vonnegut

His mother understood my illness immediately, that it was my world rather than myself that was diseased. — Kurt Vonnegut

Out in the world I go! Muggers! Autograph hounds! Junkies! People with real jobs! Maybe an easy lay! United Nation functionaries and diplomats! — Kurt Vonnegut

At least the World will end, an event anticipated with great joy by many. It will end very soon, but not in the year 2000, which has come and gone. From that I conclude that God Almighty is not heavily into Numerology. — Kurt Vonnegut

But that's fetishism, I think, writing books to write books. — Kurt Vonnegut

I came to speak ill of Swedish engineering, and so diddled myself out of a Nobel Prize. — Kurt Vonnegut

The difference between my fans and Kurt's is that my fans know they're mentally ill. — Kurt Vonnegut

I was on a par with the Creator of the Universe there in the dark in the cocktail lounge. I shrunk the Universe to a ball exactly one light-year in diameter. I had it explode. I had it disperse itself again.
Ask me a question, any question. How old is the Universe? It is one half-second old, but that half-second has lasted one quintillion years so far. Who created it? Nobody created it. It has always been here. — Kurt Vonnegut

The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. You are afraid of pain now, Unk, but you won't learn anything if you don't invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain. — Kurt Vonnegut

Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued t think of ordinary human beings as machines. — Kurt Vonnegut

He also began to suspect, since he was so much busier than anybody else, that he was the leader — Kurt Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim: "You guys go on without me. I'll be alright."
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut — Kurt Vonnegut

This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn't love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe. *** The black people would not put up with this. They went on talking English every which way. They refused to read books they couldn't understand - on the grounds they couldn't understand them. They would ask such impudent questions as, Whuffo I want to read no Tale of Two Cities? Whuffo? — Kurt Vonnegut

How come you never use semicolons?" she'll say. Or: "How come you chop it all up into little sections instead of letting it flow and flow?" That sort of thing. — Kurt Vonnegut

Anyway - because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next - and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis - at any time of night or day. — Kurt Vonnegut

Suicide is the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers — Kurt Vonnegut

Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score. — Kurt Vonnegut

At this point in history, 1952 A.D., our lives and freedom depend largely upon the skill and imagination and courage of our managers and engineers, and I hope that God will help them to help us all stay alive and free. — Kurt Vonnegut

Hell is other people," said Jean-Paul Sartre. "Hell is other real people,' is what he should have said. — Kurt Vonnegut

Samaritrophia is only a disease, and a violent one, too, when it attacks those exceedingly rare individuals who reach biological maturity still loving and wanting to help their fellow men. — Kurt Vonnegut

Vera had not sensed my approach. She was peering into the instrument and turning knobs with child-like seriousness and ineptitude. It was obvious that she had never used a microscope before.
I stole closer to her, and then I said, "Boo!"
She jerked her head away from the eyepiece.
"Hello," I said.
"You scared me to death," she said.
"Sorry," I said, and I laughed.
These ancient games go on and on. It's nice they do. — Kurt Vonnegut

The truth can be very funny in an awful way, especially as it relates to greed and hipocrisy. — Kurt Vonnegut

People hate it when they're tickled because laughter is not pleasant, if it goes on too long. I think it's a desperate sort of convulsion in desperate circumstances, which helps a little. — Kurt Vonnegut

There in the hospital Billy was having an adventure very common among people without power in times of war: he was trying to prove to a willfully deaf and blind enemy that he is interesting to hear and see. — Kurt Vonnegut

What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world. — Kurt Vonnegut

Teaching, may I say, is the noblest profession of all in a democracy. — Kurt Vonnegut

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe. — Kurt Vonnegut

Science never cheered up anyone. the human situation is just too awful. — Kurt Vonnegut

Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership for so long, for all of human experience so far, that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on. — Kurt Vonnegut

The fact remains that I am stuck with the risk of being me. I am compelled, therefor, to spread the risk around a little, if I can. — Kurt Vonnegut

He says the blues can't drive depression clear out of a house, but they can drive it into the corners of any room where they are being played. — Kurt Vonnegut

She believed, and was entitled to believe, I must say, that all human beings were evil by nature, whether tormentors or victims, or idle standers-by. They could only create meaningless tragedies, she said, since they weren't nearly intelligent enough to accomplish all the good they were meant to do. — Kurt Vonnegut

He became the largest individual hog farmer in the North. And, in order not to be victimized by meat packers, he bought controlling interest in an Indianapolis slaughterhouse. In order not to be victimized by steel suppliers, he bought controlling interest in a steel company in Pittsburgh. In order not to be victimized by coal suppliers, he bought controlling interest in several mines. In order not to be victimized by money lenders, he founded a bank. — Kurt Vonnegut

As an old, old man, Trout would be asked by Dr. Thor Lembrig, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, if he feared the future. He would give this reply: 'Mr. Secretary-General, it is the past which scares the bejesus out of me. — Kurt Vonnegut

Artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive.
They are supersensitive.
They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas,
long before more robust types realize that any danger is there. — Kurt Vonnegut

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought
in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and
body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened,
though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest,
low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable. — Kurt Vonnegut

All these years, I've been opening the window and making love to the world. — Kurt Vonnegut

There was something obscene about a billionaire's being optimistic and aggressive and cunning. — Kurt Vonnegut

As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galapagos Islands, she would be stopped mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out something like this: "Maybe I'm just a crazy lady who had wandered off the street and into this classroom and started explaining the mysteries of life to these people. And they believe me, although I am utterly mistaken about simply everything."
She had to wonder, too, about all the supposedly great teachers of the past, who, although their brains were healthy, had turned out to be as wrong as Roy about what was really going on. — Kurt Vonnegut

Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics — Kurt Vonnegut

The books he and his supporters wanted out of the schools, one of mine among them, were not pornographic, although he would have liked our audience to think so. (There is the word "motherfucker" one time in my Slaughterhouse-Five, as in "Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker." Ever since that word was published, way back in 1969, children have been attempting to have intercourse with their mothers. When it will stop no one knows.) — Kurt Vonnegut

What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at once.There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. When seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. — Kurt Vonnegut

Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick, & Colon. — Kurt Vonnegut

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. — Kurt Vonnegut

Society is more concerned with material possessions than it is with the true love and compassion of another human being. — Kurt Vonnegut

When I got home from the Second World War, mu Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, "You're a man now." So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it. — Kurt Vonnegut

I was taught in the sixth grade that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it. I got a very good grade. — Kurt Vonnegut

As Marilee and I were dressing, I whispered to her that I loved her with all my heart. What else was there to say?
'You don't. You can't,' she said. — Kurt Vonnegut

They died in their middle sixties, at any rate, when hearts break easily — Kurt Vonnegut

I don't know what's going on ... and I'm probably not smart enough to understand if somebody was to explain it to me. All I know is we're being tested somehow, by somebody or some thing a whole lot smarter than us, and all I can do is be friendly and keep calm and try and have a nice time till it's over. — Kurt Vonnegut

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand. — Kurt Vonnegut

This woman was so ugly and stupid, she probably never should have been born. And yet Wait was the second person to have married her. — Kurt Vonnegut

I just know that there are plenty of people who are in terrible trouble and can't get out. And so I'm impatient with those who think that it's easy for people to get out of trouble. — Kurt Vonnegut

So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too. — Kurt Vonnegut

I sing of happiness, he says, and insecurity shows through
poisons it. I sing of unhappiness, and it spoils that, too, because my real unhappiness isn't great or noble but cheap
money unhappiness.
$10,000 a Year, Easy — Kurt Vonnegut

As a younger man, Trout would have sneered at the sign about brotherhood - posted on the rim of a bomb crater, as anyone could see. But his head no longer sheltered ideas of how things could be and should be on the planet, as opposed to how they really were. There was only one way for the Earth to be, he thought: the way it was. — Kurt Vonnegut

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia. — Kurt Vonnegut

Life, by definition, is never still. Where is it going? From birth to death, with no stops on the way. — Kurt Vonnegut

Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don't stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect. Live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy. Get somebody to teach you to play a musical instrument. — Kurt Vonnegut