Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

601 Sourced Quotes

To be is to do - Socrates To do is to be - Sartre Do Be Do Be Do - Sinatra

Kurt Vonnegut
The most useful thing I could do before this meeting is to keel over. On the other hand, artists are keeling over by the thousands every day and nobody seems to pay the least attention.

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
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
I could go on to speak of sanity as compared with insanity, decency as compared with vandalism, friendship as compared with rabies.

Kurt Vonnegut
If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Kurt Vonnegut
What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish that people wouldn't get so mad at them.

Kurt Vonnegut
It is always pitiful when any human being falls into a condition hardly more respectable than that of an animal. How much more pitiful it is when the person who falls has had all the advantages!

Kurt Vonnegut
Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.

Kurt Vonnegut
I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.

Kurt Vonnegut
Wars would be a lot better, I think, if guys would say to themselves sometimes "Jesus — I'm not going to do that to the enemy. That's too much."

Kurt Vonnegut
I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

Kurt Vonnegut
Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.

Kurt Vonnegut
If I am ever put to death on the hook, expect a very human performance.

Kurt Vonnegut
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too. And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.

Kurt Vonnegut
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate 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
"Things don't stay the way they are," said Finnerty. "It's too entertaining to try to change them."

Kurt Vonnegut
There is no WHY, since the moment simply is, and since all of us are simply trapped in the moment, like bugs in Amber.

Kurt Vonnegut
Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles away from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.
And everyday my government gives me a count of corpses created by the military service in Vietnam. So it goes.
My father died many years ago now — of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.

Kurt Vonnegut
Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

Kurt Vonnegut
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
Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.

Kurt Vonnegut
Well, I've worried some about, you know, why write books … why are we teaching people to write books when presidents and senators do not read them, and generals do not read them. And it's been the university experience that taught me that there is a very good reason, that you catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and you poison their minds with … humanity, and however you want to poison their minds, it's presumably to encourage them to make a better world.

Kurt Vonnegut
If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favorite joke.

Kurt Vonnegut
There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.

Kurt Vonnegut
It's my religion the censors hate. They find me disrespectful towards their idea of God Almighty. They think it's the proper business of government to protect the reputation of God. All I can say is, "Good luck to them, and good luck to the government, and good luck to God."

Kurt Vonnegut
Aside from battles, the history of nations seemed to consist of nothing but powerless old poops like myself, heavily medicated and vaguely beloved in the long ago, coming to kiss the boots of young psychopaths.

Kurt Vonnegut
I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

Kurt Vonnegut
Anita had the mechanics of marriage down pat, even to the subtlest conventions. If her approach was disturbingly rational, systematic, she was thorough enough to turn out a credible counterfeit of warmth.

Kurt Vonnegut
While we were being bombed in Dresden, sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one slider said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight. Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it.

Kurt Vonnegut