Slaughterhouse Quotes & Sayings

I didn't want to be greedy. It's a mark of bad character and I always believed that pigs go the slaughterhouse. — Walter Annenberg

Show me a quest for personal immortality and I'll show you a path through a slaughterhouse, and the incense of personal divinity is the stench of other people's corpses. — Barry Hughart

If you visit the killing floor of a slaughterhouse, it will brand your soul for life. — Howard Lyman

You have just dined," Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, "and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity." The — Michael Pollan

There is no meaningful distinction between eating flesh and eating dairy or other animal products. Animals exploited in the dairy industry live longer than those used for meat, but they are treated worse during their lives, and they end up in the same slaughterhouse after which we consume their flesh anyway. There is probably more suffering in a glass of milk or an ice cream cone than there is in a steak. — Gary L. Francione

War was simply a slaughterhouse on wheels, he thought. For most men, soldiering was tragedy expressed as a profession. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

I've bought perfectly healthy horses for a couple of hundred dollars just as they were about to be loaded on a slaughterhouse-bound truck. — Jane Velez-Mitchell

Sheep run to the slaughterhouse, silent and hopeless, but at least sheep never vote for the butcher who kills them or the people who devour them. More beastly than any beast, more sheepish than any sheep, the voter names his own executioner and chooses his own devourer, and for this precious 'right' a revolution was fought. — Octave Mirbeau

I used to suffer particularly because the poor animals must endure so much pain and want. The sight of an old, limping horse being dragged along by one man while another man struck him with
a stick he was being driven to the Colmar slaughterhouse - haunted me for weeks. — Albert Schweitzer

Fobbit is fast, razor sharp, and seven kinds of hilarious. Thank you, Mr. Abrams, for the much needed salve
it feels good to finally laugh about Iraq. Fobbit deserves a place alongside Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22 as one of our great comic novels about the absurdity of war. — Jonathan Evison

So it goes."
Unlike many of these quotes, the repeated refrain from Vonnegut's classic Slaughterhouse-Five isn't notable for its unique wording so much as for how much emotion - and dismissal of emotion - it packs into three simple, world-weary words that simultaneously accept and dismiss everything. There's a reason this quote graced practically every elegy written for Vonnegut over the past two weeks (yes, including ours): It neatly encompasses a whole way of life. More crudely put: "Shit happens, and it's awful, but it's also okay. We deal with it because we have to. — Kurt Vonnegut

He open his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he keeps bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance known as the vomito negro, or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughterhouse. The black vomit is loaded with virus. — Richard Preston

Be the slaughterhouse for sacred cows. — Cassandra Duffy

I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn't have to write at all anymore if I didn't want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don't know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they're through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn't ask to be flowers and I didn't ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five ... I had a shutting-off feeling ... that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK . — Kurt Vonnegut

The girls screamed. They covered themselves with their hands and turned their backs and so on, and made themselves utterly beautiful. — Kurt Vonnegut

No single expression denotes love. It's so complex it requires combinations of expressions. These create an identifiable look. You see something like it sometimes in the eyes of slaughterhouse steers. — L. M. Boyd

The more I read and watched about the meat industry, the more determined I became to keep meat out of my diet. The things I saw in slaughterhouse exposes made me feel sick and I refused to just ignore what I now knew. — Renee Olstead

Though the industrial logic that made feeding cattle to cattle seem like a good idea has been thrown into doubt by mad cow disease, I was surprised to learn it hadn't been discarded. The FDA ban on feeding ruminant protein to ruminants makes an exception for blood products and fat; my steer will probably dine on beef tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he's heading to in June. — Michael Pollan

God went out of me
as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun
became a latrine.
God went out of my fingers.
They became stone.
My body became a side of mutton
and despair roamed the slaughterhouse. — Anne Sexton

My good friend the Governor said I could settle down at Port Stanley and take things quietly for a few weeks. The street of that port is about a mile and a half long. It has the slaughterhouse at one end and the graveyard at the other. The chief distraction is to walk from the slaughterhouse to the graveyard. For a change one may walk from the graveyard to the slaughterhouse. — Ernest Shackleton

Five German soldiers and a police dog on a leash were looking down into the bed of the creek. The soldiers' blue eyes were filled with a bleary civilian curiosity as to why one American would try to murder another one so far from home, and why the victim should laugh. — Kurt Vonnegut

If you find your truth you must follow it. You could find it in a paper bag, or in a statue, or in a slaughterhouse; you might find it dangling somewhere. People might say, What the heck are you doing? but its ok if they dont understand. And if you follow it, stay true to it, and respect it, you could be in store for the greatest journey you could ever imagine. — Buckethead

In the heart of the slaughterhouse
always
enough room to nourish the awe. — John Nichols

Americans are following a stampede to the financial slaughterhouse. Let us stop following them and go in the other direction. — Celso Cukierkorn

MR. MOUSTAFA
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once know as humanity... He was one of them. What more is there to say? — Wes Anderson

The fast-food hamburger has been brilliantly engineered to offer a succulent and tasty first bite, a bite that in fact would be impossible to enjoy if the eater could accurately picture the feedlot and slaughterhouse and the workers behind it or knew anything about the 'artificial grill flavor' that made the first bite so convincing. This is a hamburger to hurry through, no question. By comparison, eating a grass-fed burger when you can picture the green pastures in which the animal grazed is a pleasure of another order, not a simple one, to be sure, but one based on knowledge rather than ignorance and gratitude rather than indifference.
To eat slowly, then, also means to eat deliberately, in the original sense of the word: 'from freedom' instead of compulsion. — Michael Pollan

I looked at the woman crying over the doll and felt something else. I was sick of people acting against their own interests. Mooing about how to refinance the slaughterhouse. Putting skylights in the killing pen and pretending the bolt in the brain was a pathway to a better field. I paid my bill. Save your fucking pennies for a gun and a history book, I thought. — Vanessa Veselka

Heaven and happiness do not exist. That is your parents' way to justify the crime of having brought you into this world. What exists is reality, the tough reality, this slaughterhouse we've come to die in, if not to kill and to eat the animals, our fellow creatures. Therefore, do not reproduce, do not repeat the crimes committed against you, do not give back the same, evil paid with evil, as imposing life is the ultimate crime. Do not disturb the unborn, let them be in the peace of nothingness. Anyway we'll all eventually go back there, so why beat around the bush? — Fernando Vallejo

A consequentialist or utilitarian is likely to approach the abortion question in a very different way, by trying to weigh up suffering. Does the embryo suffer? (Presumably not if it is aborted before it has a nervous system; and even if it is old enough to have a nervous system it surely suffers less than, say, an adult cow in a slaughterhouse.) Does the pregnant woman, or her family, suffer if she does not have an abortion? Very possibly so; and, in any case, given that the embryo lacks a nervous system, shouldn't the mother's well-developed nervous system have the choice? — Richard Dawkins

They walked gingerly across the junk-filled vacant lots to the local abattoir - a place of infinite fascination, with its strange sights and stranger smells.
It was a thrill - because it outraged their every sense of animal love - to watch the killings. To see calm, innocent cattle led one by one into that room with the fetid smells and the stained, concrete floor always a'swish with running water. To see brawny, heavy-set Gus Milner and his equally big son, Charley, slip the snubbing rope through the ring in the cow's nose, and relentlessly draw its head down and down until its nose touched the heavy ring set in the floor, then fasten it.
Their hearts did strange nip-ups just back of their mouths as one of the men would pick up the heavy sledge, and with one great, perfectly aimed blow, strike the animal just between and a bit above the eyes. They always jumped at the sudden slump as the carcass dropped, spraddled and lifeless, to the floor.
("The Shed") — E. Everett Evans

I turned the page in Slaughterhouse Five, a forbidden book at Belmont because we were too young to read about soldiers swearing and bombs dropping and bodies blowing up and war sucking. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Nearly all the writing of our time is likely to disappear in a hundred years. Certainly most readers - and nearly all critics - feel that [Kurt] Vonnegut started to repeat himself, to grow increasingly self-indulgent and meandering, and to sometimes just blather in his later work. But his books up to "Slaughterhouse-Five" do possess a distinctiveness that will insure some kind of permanence, if only in the history of the 1960s and of science fiction. — Michael Dirda

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. — Kurt Vonnegut

I, personally, no longer take part in the ecstatic public condemnation of people unless they've committed a transgression that has an actual victim, and even then not as much as I probably should. I miss the fun a little. But it feels like when I became a vegetarian. I missed the steak, although not as much as I'd anticipated, but I could no longer ignore the slaughterhouse. — Jon Ronson

You see? There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that's what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant - (sighs deeply). Oh, fuck it.

-M. Gustave, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) — Wes Anderson

We don't need a law against McDonald's or a law against slaughterhouse abuse
we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse. — Joel Salatin

Chess and you taking a picture of me reading Slaughterhouse-Five, telling me I'd need proof someday because nobody in Creek View would ever believe I had actually read a goddamn book, let alone five. Talking about God and why there's evil in the world and bitching because the Steelers won the Super Bowl. Camp Leatherneck, me not missing home at all and you missing it like crazy, always talking about going to college and how when you had leave you were gonna marry Hannah. And you wanted kids, and I said I didn't because people like me, we just end up disappointing one another and I'd probably be like my dad, and you told me I had to get over it, get over my dad and my mom and how screwed up everything is because you said, Josh, you're gonna have it all. I know it. You're gonna have it all. And for the first time, I'm almost believing that. — Heather Demetrios

As for the military advantage of such a bombardment, I simply cannot grasp it. I have seen housewives disemboweled, children mutilated; I have seen the old itinerant market crone sponge from her treasure the brains with which they were spattered. I have seen a janitor's wife come out of her cellar and douse the sullied pavement with a bucket of water, and I am still unable to understand what part these humble slaughterhouse accidents play in warfare. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

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. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.
So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: "Mary," I said, "I don't think this book of mine will ever be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.
"I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it 'The Children's Crusade.'"
She was my friend after that. — Kurt Vonnegut

For us the Dresden Dolls were porcelain dolls that were made in that city at the time, that is what they were to us, and also a reference in Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut, and in a song by The Fall. — Brian Viglione

Widespread introduction of the process [of irradiating foods] has thus far been impeded, however, by a reluctance among consumers to eat things that have been exposed to radiation. According to current USDA regulations, irradiated meat must be identified with a special label and with a radura (the internationally recognized symbol of radiation). The Beef Industry Food Safety Council - whose members include the meatpacking and fast food giants - has asked the USDA to change its rules and make the labeling of irradiated meat completely voluntary. The meatpacking industry is also working hard to get rid of the word 'irradiation,; much preferring the phrase 'cold pasteurization.' ... From a purely scientific point of view, irradiation may be safe and effective. But he [a slaughterhouse engineer] is concerned about the introduction of highly complex electromagnetic and nuclear technology into slaughterhouses with a largely illiterate, non-English-speaking workforce. — Eric Schlosser

The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world's total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000. I suppose they will all want dignity, I said. — Kurt Vonnegut

I have graded my separate works from A to D. The grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself. Thus can I give myself an A-plus for Cat's Cradle, while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare. The report card is chronological, so you can plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like:
Player Piano B
The Sirens of Titan A
Mother Night A
Cat's Cradle A-plus
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A
Slaughterhouse-Five A-plus
Welcome to the Monkey House B-minus
Happy Birthday, Wanda June D
Breakfast of Champions C
Wampeters, Foma & Grandfalloons C
Slapstick D
Jailbird A
Palm Sunday C — Kurt Vonnegut

Good evening, London. I would introduce myself, but truth to tell, I do not have a name. You can call me "V". Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse. In anarchy, there is another way. With anarchy, from rubble comes new life, hope reinstated. They say anarchy's dead, but see ... reports of my death were ... exaggerated. Tomorrow, Downing Street will be destroyed, the Head reduced to ruins, an end to what has gone before. Tonight, you must choose what comes next. Lives of our own, or a return to chains. Choose carefully. And so, adieu. — Alan Moore

Tonight, the Sisters of Saint Joseph and I are going to The Slaughterhouse Bar. I have four rolls of quarters and we are going to dance until there's blood in our slippers. — Marie-Helene Bertino

What is the bottom line for the animal/human hierarchy? I think it is at the animate/inanimate line, and Carol Adams and others are close to it: we eat them. This is what humans want from animals and largely why and how they are most harmed. We make them dead so we can live. We make our bodies out of their bodies. Their inanimate becomes our animate. We justify it as necessary, but it is not. We do it because we want to, we enjoy it, and we can. We say they eat each other, too, which they do. But this does not exonerate us; it only makes us animal rather than human, the distinguishing methodology abandoned when its conclusions are inconvenient or unpleasant. The place to look for this bottom line is the farm, the stockyard, the slaughterhouse. I have yet to see one run by a nonhuman animal. — Catherine Mackinnon

Prisons are about addictions. Most prisoners are casualties of their own habits. They have all created victims, some in cruel and callous ways, but almost to a man they have first practiced that cruelty on themselves. Prison provides the loneliness that fuels addiction. It is the slaughterhouse for addicts, and all are eventually delivered to its gates. — Stephen Reid

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals. — Theodor W. Adorno

The piety, the gentleness, the honesty, the sensitivity, all the qualities she has learned to admire in herself, are invitations to violence; all her life, she has been groomed for the slaughterhouse. And though she is virtuous, she does not know how to do good. — Angela Carter

Jump way back to one time, Evie and me did this fashion shoot in a junk yard, in a slaughterhouse, in a mortuary. We'd go anywhere to look good by comparison, and what I realize is mostly what I hate about Evie is the fact that she's so vain and stupid and needy. But what I hate most is how she's just like me. What I really hate is me so I hate pretty much everybody. — Chuck Palahniuk

Well than try giving it some thought, why don't you? Apply that finely tutored mind of yours to all those bullshit hero-with-a-high-destiny legends you people are so fucking fond of telling one another. You really think, in a mudball slaughterhouse of a world like this, where war and privation harden whole populations to inhuman brutality and ignorance, where the ruling classes dedicate their sons to learning the science of killing men the way they consign their daughters to breeding till they crack
you really think the gods of a world like that have got no better thing to do with their time than take some random piece of lowborn trash and spend long years carving him into shape for a cat's-paw? — Richard K. Morgan

What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It's good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being. — George Saunders

I despair at the rise of modern violence. I truly give in to despair at times, that deep, futureless pit of despair ... I watch the American slaughterhouse, the casual attacks on popes, presidents, and uncounted others, and I wonder if there are many more out there with the Ability or if butchery has simply become the modern way of life. — Dan Simmons

Greetings," he said. His tone admitted of no weakness whatsoever. "I am Drill Instructor (Slaughterhouse) Larry Southard. For my sins, I have been placed in charge of the latest intake of prospective marines. With — Christopher G. Nuttall

The institution was a cross between an orphanage and a slaughterhouse. Worst of all, it was run entirely by norms. The word alone would set my chin trembling. I would beg and grieve and he would allow that I deserved another chance. — Katherine Dunn

Where's your dog?' I ask quickly. 'Dawn said you had a dog. Let's take the dog out.'
'There ain't no dog,' replies Janis. — Carla H. Krueger

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sam's a - pardon my French - chicken-shit-paper-thin liar whose word is as good as a slaughterhouse bird promising golden eggs." If — Anne McAneny

We headed toward the creepy old slaughterhouse full of dangerous beings. Which ... pretty much tells you what kind of day I was having, right there. — Jim Butcher

Look, look,' cried the count, seizing the young man's hands - look, for on my soul it is curious. Here is a man who had resigned himself to his fate, who was going to the scaffold to die - like a coward, it is true, but he was about to die without resistance. Do you know what gave him strength? - do you know what consoled him? It was, that another partook of his punishment - that another partook of his anguish - that another was to die before him. Lead two sheep to the butcher's, two oxen to the slaughterhouse, and make one of them understand that his companion will not die; the sheep will bleat for pleasure, the ox will bellow with joy. But man - man, who God created in his own image - man, upon whom God has laid his first, his sole commandment, to love his neighbour - man, to whom God has given a voice to express his thoughts - what is his first cry when he hears his fellowman is saved? A blasphemy. Honour to man, this masterpiece of nature, this king of the creation! — Alexandre Dumas

Never lose time in sending the scapegoat to the slaughterhouse. — Ali Sheikh

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

Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse. — Alan Moore

If everybody would leave him alone for just a little while, he thought, he
wouldn't cause anybody any more trouble. He would turn to steam and float up among
the treetops. — Kurt Vonnegut

It smelled like a slaughterhouse. I was standing in the interrogation room of Saddam Hussein's Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad. A stench of blood and death permeated my senses, my clothes, my being. — Bernard B. Kerik

In the slaughterhouse of love, they kill only the best, none of the weak or deformed. Don't run away from this dying. Whoever's not killed for love is dead meat. — Rumi

Go down any road far enough
and you'll come to a slaughterhouse,
but keep going and you'll reach the sea. — Dean Young

Based on my time living with rats and mice in Washington, D.C., I have always assumed that animals will escape such fires, since their senses of smell, wariness of such dangers, and ability to move through almost invisible holes is so impressive, but I think that we should not dismiss the possibility that they, also, will be harmed. These reflections do not, of course, rule out burning meat trucks. And they don't mean that when the next slaughterhouse or vivisection lab burns down, I will denounce those who carried out the burning, or that I will feel anything other than joy in my heart ... — Bruce Friedrich

I'm no shrinking violet. I played hockey until half my teeth were knocked down my throat. And I'm extremely competitive on a tennis court ... But that experience at the slaughterhouse overwhelmed me. When I walked out of there, I knew I would never again harm an animal! I knew all the physiological, economic, and ecological arguments supporting vegetarianism, but it was firsthand experience of man's cruelty to animals that laid the real groundwork for my commitment to vegetarianism. — Peter Burwash

The gaping trunk looked like the mouth of a village idiot who was explaining that he didn't know anything about anything. — Kurt Vonnegut

Since we can't count on the meat, egg, and dairy industries to protect animals from the most egregious forms of cruelty, what can we, as consumers, do? Opting out of paying someone to allow animals to die in a barn fire or at the slaughterhouse seems pretty reasonable. — Ingrid Newkirk

YOU WEREN'T born choking on no silver spoon, you know how it goes when you go looking for a job and you need one: You wait in the first indifferent room, ink in the forms, apply in another room with linoleum that's waxy and squeaks and overhead lights that don't miss a thing; then there's the desk and the person behind it who thinks he's an admiral, or it's a she and she thinks she's now in line for the throne to somewhere, and next you're kissing ass and aw-shucksing toward the desk, telling how bad all your life you've been wanting to be night janitor in a chemical plant, or hog wrangler in a slaughterhouse, or pizza delivery boy, how you've laid awake in bed gettin' goose bumps just from imagining how high and wide your life might someday be lived if ever you could average five dollars and forty cents an hour. But — Daniel Woodrell

Wherever he goes, whatever he does, he will always see that word: murder - immortally inscribed upon the pediment of that vast slaughterhouse - humanity. — Octave Mirbeau

The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.
There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling I had to believe whatever clocks said -and calendars. — Kurt Vonnegut

Billy took off his tri-focals and his coat and his necktie and his shoes, and he closed the venetian blinds and then the drapes, and he lay down on the outside of the coverlet. But sleep would not come. Tears came instead. They seeped.
[ ... ] He closed his eyes, and opened them again. He was still weeping, but he was back in Luxembourg again. He was marching with a lot of other prisoners. It was a winter wind that was bringing tears to his eyes. — Kurt Vonnegut

One time I took my knife and sliced off the end of a hog's nose, just like a piece of salami. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it sat there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt and rubbed it on the wound. Now that hog really went nuts. It was my way of taking out frustration. Another time, there was a live hog in the pit. It hadn't done anything wrong, wasn't even running around. It was just alive. I took a three-foot chunk of pipe and I literally beat that hog to death. It was like I started hitting the hog and I couldn't stop. And when I finally did stop, I'd expended all this energy and frustration, and I'm thinking what in God's sweet name did I do. — Gail A. Eisnitz

My wife Kimora once told me while we were watching "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" that it's a vegetarian movie because the way that the woman was screaming, "Aaaahhh," and trying to run away is how every animal you eat reacted at the slaughterhouse. — Russell Simmons

I am free. I am one of the few free people in this country of utterly transparent slavery. A slavery covered by a sloppy coat of contemporary varnish. I have fought a long and bloodless battle for this pitiable personal freedom. I fought for my freedom against the temptations, ambitions, and appetites witch drive everyone blindly on the slaughterhouse. To the so-called modern slaughterhouse for human dignity, honor, and for something else, too, which we forgot about a long time ago. — Tadeusz Konwicki

Places: a cold, bleak, lonely day on the rim at Muley Point, Utah. And the heart-cracking loveliness of the blood-smeared, bitter, incomprehensible slaughterhouse of a world ... — Edward Abbey

They were going back to the slaughterhouse for souvenirs of the war. — Kurt Vonnegut

the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoners of war. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I'm proud to say I'm the only Slaughterhouse member who has not rewritten a verse yet, and that's the ongoing joke in the group, 'cause everybody has rewrote their sh*t except for me. — Joe Budden

Modern broadcast television, with its digital boxes and fiber optics and orbiting geosynchronous satellites, has become a perfectly engineered slaughterhouse of time. — Daniel R. Thorne

You eat the burger but you don't want the slaughterhouse next door to where you live. — Chicken John

Such is the condition of organic nature! whose first law might be expressed in the words 'Eat or be eaten!' and which would seem to be one great slaughter-house, one universal scene of rapacity and injustice! — Erasmus Darwin

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

What sort of God would put us here in this goddamned, stinking slaughterhouse of a world? — William Lindsay Gresham

The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought. — Kurt Vonnegut

Science is now the craft of the manipulation, substitution and deflection of the forces of nature. What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, an Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth. — Erwin Chargaff

When a bull is being lead to the slaughter, it still hopes to break loose and trample its butchers. Other bulls have not been able to pass on the knowledge that this never happens and that from the slaughterhouse there is no way back to the herd. But in human society there is a continuous exchange of experience. I have never heard of a man who broke away and fled while being led to his execution. It is even thought to be a special form of courage if a man about to be executed refuses to be blindfolded and dies with his eyes open. But I would rather have the bull with his blind rage, the stubborn beast who doesn't weigh his chances of survival with the prudent dull-wittedness of man, and doesn't know the despicable feeling of despair. — Nadezhda Mandelstam

Smart, sharp, and hilarious, Slaughterhouse 90210 is the perfect pick-me-up and never-put-me-down book. — Jami Attenberg

You're like a man who loves nothing better than a thick steak but wouldn't last an hour in a slaughterhouse. — Stephen King

The admission fee was a viper's tongue and a half-concealed stiletto. It was a sort of intellectual slaughterhouse. — Groucho Marx

Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse. — J.G. Ballard

Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The gamecock proudly stepped into the slaughterhouse. — Toba Beta

I discovered that bone china was a British invention, which had been developed by a pottery sited next to a slaughterhouse - 'bone' china, of course, contains bones, though we are inclined to forget that. — Christien Meindertsma

What sense does it make to kill an animal because you enjoy the way it tastes? It might be easy to ignore the issue when you don't see it first hand, but billions of animals are killed for meat every day, living their brief lives tortured in a slaughterhouse. We kill animals for profit and pleasure, when we have the resources to get the nutrients we need from plants that we can produce ourselves. — Joseph P. Kauffman

Dystopian Cybernetic Environment in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five — Ruzbeh Babaee

I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to 'real life' - he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit. In fact, 'Slaughterhouse-Five' seemed to be saying that our most profound experiences may require this artistic uncoupling from the actual. The black box is meant to change us. If the change will be greater via the use of invented, absurd material, so be it. — George Saunders