Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
601 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
The good Earth—we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.
Sometimes quoted in the form: We could have saved the earth, but we were too damned cheap.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
"You think I'm insane?" said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him.
"You're still in touch. I guess that's the test."
"Barely — barely."
"A psychiatrist could help. There's a good man in Albany."
Finnerty shook his head. "He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." He nodded, "Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first."
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
About astrology and palmistry: They are good because they make people feel vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
It seems to me divorce is so common now. It ought to be more institutionalized. It's like a head-on collision every time. It's supposed to be a surprise but it's commonplace.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
And what gift of America to the rest of the world is actually most appreciated by the rest of the world? It is African American jazz and its offshoots. What is my definition of jazz? Safe sex of the highest order.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
I apologize because of the terrible mess the planet is in. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any 'Good Old Days,' there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, 'Don't look at me. I just got here myself.'
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
In order to get what we've got, Anita, we have, in effect, traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them — the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren't and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
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.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Why are so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissue? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
I can't tell if you're serious or not,' said the driver. I won't know myself until I find out if life is serious or not,' said Trout. 'It's dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean it's serious, too.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
Paul wondered at what thorough believers in mechanization most Americans were, even when their lives had been badly damaged by mechanization.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
Roses are red
And ready for plucking
You're sixteen
And ready for high school.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple years back by the wife of our President: "Just say no.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
During my most recently controlled near-death experience, I got to interview William Shakespeare. We did not hit it off. He said the dialect I spoke was the ugliest English he had ever heard, fit to split the ears of groundlings. He asked if it had a name, and I said Indianapolis.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
We've sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I wish we hadn't. I hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer show.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch: everything stops.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
Billy coughed when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit thin gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton. This law tells us that for each reaction there is a reaction which is equal and opposite in direction. This can be useful in rocketry.
Kurt Vonnegut
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
...
25
Quote of the day
There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.
F. H. Bradley
Kurt Vonnegut
Creative Commons
Born:
November 11, 1922
Died:
April 11, 2007
(aged 84)
Bio:
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was an American author. In a career spanning over 50 years, Vonnegut published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of non-fiction.
Known for:
Slaughterhouse 5 (1969)
Cat's Cradle (1963)
Breakfast of Champions (1973)
Mother Night (1961)
The Sirens of Titan (1959)
Most used words:
people
,
life
,
time
,
human
,
god
,
love
,
man
,
war
,
earth
,
person
,
matter
,
find
,
dead
,
big
,
years
Kurt Vonnegut on Wikipedia
Kurt Vonnegut works on Gutenberg Project
Kurt Vonnegut works on Wikisource
Kurt Vonnegut on Twitter
Kurt Vonnegut Website
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
Kurt Vonnegut Short Quotes
Quotes about Kurt Vonnegut
American Playwright Quotes
Playwright Quotes
20th-century Playwright Quotes
Related People
Ernest Hemingway
American Journalist
Ray Bradbury
American Author
Isaac Asimov
American Author
Family
Mark Vonnegut
Son
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes