Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
601 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
In case you haven't noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
It is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln. He always steals the show.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
Let us devote to unselfishness the frenzy we once gave gold and underpants.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
It's a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
"All people are insane," he said. "They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons."
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
I don't think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they're talking about the secrets they've been told or haven't been told. They're talking about intimate things, family things, love things," that nice old lady said to me. "Mr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren't the main things with him.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
"You hate America, don't you?" she said.
"That would be as silly as loving it," I said. "It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to the human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will."
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
I don't care if I'm remembered or not when I'm dead. (A scientist I knew at General Electric, who was married to a woman named Josephine, said to me, "Why should I buy life insurance? If I die, I won't care what's happening to Jo. I won't care about anything. I'll be dead.")
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
Everybody's shaking in his boots, so don't be bluffed.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment."
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. You are afraid of pain now, Unk, but you won't learn anything if you don't invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
When Paul thought about his effortless rise in the hierarchy, he sometimes, as now, felt sheepish, like a charlatan. He could handle his assignments all right, but he didn't have what his father had, what Kroner had, what Shepherd had, what so many had: the sense of spiritual importance in what they were doing; the ability to be moved emotionally, almost like a lover, by the great omnipresent and omniscient spook, the corporate personality. In short, what Paul missed was what made his father aggressive and great: the capacity to really give a damn.
Kurt Vonnegut
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
...
25
Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
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
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