Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

601 Sourced Quotes

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
On the day they dropped the bomb Frank had a tablespoon and a Mason jar. What he was doing was spooning different kinds of bugs into the jar and making them fight....I can remember other bug fights we staged later on...They won't fight unless you keep shaking the jar.

Kurt Vonnegut
Let us devote to unselfishness the frenzy we once gave gold and underpants.

Kurt Vonnegut
Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

Kurt Vonnegut
I couldn't survive my own pessimism if I didn't have some kind of sunny little dream. … Human beings will be happier — not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie — but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia. That's what I want for me.

Kurt Vonnegut
It is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln. He always steals the show.

Kurt Vonnegut
I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy — because we're experienced with it, you know. And, in democracy, after a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go. And, after a hundred and fifty years, you have to let your women vote. And, at the beginning of democracy, is that quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite okay. And that's what's going on now.

Kurt Vonnegut
On Tralfamadore, says Billy Pilgrim, there isn't much interest in Jesus Christ. The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind, he says, is Charles Darwin - who taught that those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements. So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut
This person has just arrived on this planet, knows nothing about it, has no standards by which to judge it. This person does not care what it becomes. It is eager to become absolutely anything it is supposed to be.

Kurt Vonnegut
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Kurt Vonnegut
In case you haven't noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

Kurt Vonnegut
We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.

Kurt Vonnegut
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
Listen:
The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. "Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?" she asked me.
"The big show is inside my head," I said

Kurt Vonnegut
[Vietnam] only made billionaires out of millionaires. [Iraq] is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.

Kurt Vonnegut
We're not too young for love, just too young for about everything there is that goes with love.

Kurt Vonnegut
It's all like an ocean!" cried Dostoevski. I say it's all like cellophane.

Kurt Vonnegut
He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next

Kurt Vonnegut
The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they didn't use them for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get. So, in the interest of survival they trained themselves to be agreeing machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking and then they thought it too.

Kurt Vonnegut