Kurt Vonnegut Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

• My country is in ruins. So I'm a fish in a poisoned fishbowl. I'm mostly just heartsick about this. There should have been hope. This should have been a great country. But we are despised all over the world now. I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That's why I served in World War II, and that's why I wrote books.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Country, War, Book

  Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com

  12 Copy quote

• Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Writing, Tired, People

  18 Copy quote

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

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Giving, Earth Day, Environmental

  54 Copy quote

• The biggest truth to face now - what is probably making me unfunny now for the remainder of my life - is that I don't think people give a damn whether the planet goes or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Dream, Grandchildren, Thinking

  Kurt Vonnegut (2011). “A Man Without a Country”, p.70, Seven Stories Press

  5 Copy quote

• How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?....The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Lonely, Religious, Loneliness

  Kurt Vonnegut (1982). “Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage”, Dell Books

  10 Copy quote

• The Summer had died peacefully in its sleep, and Autumn, as soft-spoken executrix, was locking life up safely until Spring came to claim it.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Summer, Spring, Sleep

  Kurt Vonnegut (2010). “Look At the Birdie”, p.7, Random House

  6 Copy quote

• The First Amendment reads more like a dream than a law, and no other nation, so far as I know, has been crazy enough to include such a dream among its fundamental legal documents. I defend it because it has been so successful for two centuries in preserving our freedom and increasing our vitality, knowing that all arguments in support of it are certain to sound absurd.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Dream, Crazy, Successful

  7 Copy quote

• People are only animals, but special animals. Every animal has fought and killed to survive, even before the dinosaurs. We're the only ones that do it for fun. That's why I don't know about Darwinism. Supposedly evolution and natural selection are all about survival, but we haven't gotten smarter over the years, only more dangerous.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Fun, Animal, Years

  4 Copy quote

• A lack of seriousness has led to all sorts of wonderful insights.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Creativity, Ideas, Imagination

  7 Copy quote

• The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  People, Together, Useless

  Kurt Vonnegut (1973). “Breakfast of champions: or, Goodbye blue Monday!”, Dell

  8 Copy quote

• The most racist, nastiest act by the USA, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki. Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away men, women, and children.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Children, Military, Men

  8 Copy quote

• Bill Gates says, 'Wait till you can see what your computer can become.' But it’s you who should be doing the becoming. What you can become is the miracle you were born to work-not the damn fool computer.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Waiting, Miracle, Bills

  4 Copy quote

• What can any one person do?' he said. 'Each person does a little something,' I said, 'and there you are.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Doe, Littles, Said

  Kurt Vonnegut (2009). “Mother Night: A Novel”, p.235, Dial Press

  5 Copy quote

• The computer revolution has allowed white-collar criminals to do what the Mob would have loved to do - put a pawnshop and a loan shark in every home!

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Home, Sharks, White

  4 Copy quote

• I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Brother, Taken, Color

  Harold Bloom, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (2009). “Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-five”, p.47, Infobase Publishing

  10 Copy quote

• And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Healing, Slaughterhouse Five, Slaughterhouse 5

  KURT VONNEGUT JR (1969). “SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE”

  37 Copy quote

• Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Imagination, Awful, Machinery

  Kurt Vonnegut (1973). “Breakfast of champions: or, Goodbye blue Monday!”, Dell

  4 Copy quote

• Do I resent rich people? No. The best or worst I can do is notice them. I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  People, Rich, Poor

  Kurt Vonnegut (1997). “Hocus Pocus”, p.146, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Crazy, Kids, Fighting

  "Cold Turkey" by Kurt Vonnegut, inthesetimes.com. May 10, 2004.

  17 Copy quote

• 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 really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Moving, Book, Artist

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Turkeys, Environmental

  Kurt Vonnegut (2011). “A Man Without a Country”, p.42, Seven Stories Press

  15 Copy quote

• Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galapagos Islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next--and on and on.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Islands, People, Heaven

  Kurt Vonnegut (1999). “Galapagos: A Novel”, Dial Press

  7 Copy quote

• You can't fight progress. The best you can do is ignore it, until it finally takes your livelihood and self-respect away.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Fighting, Self, Progress

  Kurt Vonnegut (1999). “Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction”, Putnam Publishing Group

  5 Copy quote

• In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in his cosmic loneliness. And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat, looked around, and spoke. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely. "Everything must have a purpose?" asked God. "Certainly," said man. "Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God. And He went away.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Loneliness, Men, Thinking

  8 Copy quote

• During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in - and which we lost - every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Country, War, Artist

  "Vonnegut at 80". Interview with David Hoppe, www.nuvo.net. January 1, 2003.

  73 Copy quote

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