Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

601 Sourced Quotes

My epitaph in any case? "Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt." I will have gotten off so light, whatever the heck it is that was going on.

Kurt Vonnegut
Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer people to find, was this: WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT
BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP Only he didn't say 'doggone.'

Kurt Vonnegut
I said in Slapstick that she [his sister] was the person I wrote for — that every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind. That's the secret of artistic unity.

Kurt Vonnegut
Requiem: The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do." The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing. When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.

Kurt Vonnegut
Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me in my father's voice: "Make me young, make me young, make me young!"

Kurt Vonnegut
Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

Kurt Vonnegut
She broke my heart. I didn't like that much. But that was the price. In this world, you get what you pay for.

Kurt Vonnegut
I had taught myself that a human being might as well look for diamond tiaras in the gutter as for rewards and punishments that were fair.

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
The lieutenant-colonel realized for the first time what most people never realize about themselves - that he was not only a victim of outrageous fortune, hilt one of outrageous fortune's cruelest agents as well.

Kurt Vonnegut
I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash.

Kurt Vonnegut
If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.

Kurt Vonnegut
The Contessa was surely way ahead of her time, too, in believing that men were not only usless and idiotic, but downright dangerous. That idea wouldn't catch on big in her native country until the last three years of the Vietnam War.

Kurt Vonnegut
You know—we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. "My God, my God—" I said to myself, "it's the Children's Crusade."

Kurt Vonnegut
What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!

Kurt Vonnegut
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact how hard money is to come by, and, there, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves.

Kurt Vonnegut
These displaced people need something, and the clergy can't give it to them—or it's impossible for them to take what the clergy offers. The clergy says it's enough, and so does the Bible. The people say it isn't enough, and I suspect they're right.

Kurt Vonnegut
Don't worry about your father. He's a perfectly contented, self-sufficient zombie.

Kurt Vonnegut
If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.

Kurt Vonnegut
She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.

Kurt Vonnegut
We took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE

Kurt Vonnegut
The crowd, having been promised nothing, felt cheated, having received nothing.

Kurt Vonnegut
Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

Kurt Vonnegut
This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

Kurt Vonnegut
The slaves were simply turned loose without any property. They were easily recognizable. They were black. They were suddenly free to go exploring.

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
Some automatic device clicked in her big brain, and her knees felt weak, and there was a chilly feeling in her stomach. She was in love with this man. They don't make memories like that anymore

Kurt Vonnegut
Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.

Kurt Vonnegut
Maybe God has let everybody who ever lived be reborn — so he or she can see how it ends. Even Pitecanthropus erectus and Australopithecus and Sinanthropus pekensis and the Neanderthalers are back on Earth — to see how it ends. They're all on Times Square — making change for peepshows. Or recruiting Marines.

Kurt Vonnegut
The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage — and his children, and his cities, too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still — I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art.

Kurt Vonnegut