Kurt Vonnegut - Earth Quotes

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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
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

Kurt Vonnegut
The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC.

Kurt Vonnegut
What good is a planet called Earth, after all, if you own no land?

Kurt Vonnegut
How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?....The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.

Kurt Vonnegut
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.

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
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
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
It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.

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
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
If I hadn't spent so much time studying Earthlings," said the Tralfamadorian, "I wouldn't have any idea what was meant by 'free will.' I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.

Kurt Vonnegut
Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies.

Kurt Vonnegut
This husband of yours, he'd rather have his wife a— Rather, have her— Halyard cleared his throat— than go into public relations?
I'm proud to say, said the girl, that he's one of the few men on earth with a little self-respect left.

Kurt Vonnegut
The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: "Nothing.

Kurt Vonnegut
We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

Kurt Vonnegut
I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for—to find out how much a man could take without breaking.

Kurt Vonnegut
What does A. D. signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that. Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person?

Kurt Vonnegut
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies — "God damn it, you've got to be kind."

Kurt Vonnegut
Here lies Howard Campbell's essence,
Freed from his body's noisome nuisance.
His body, empty, prowls the earth,
Earning what a body's worth.
If his body and his essence remain apart,
Burn his body, but spare this, his heart.

Kurt Vonnegut
The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.

Kurt Vonnegut
Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we've got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that's why you ought to be glad you're an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they're doing.

Kurt Vonnegut
Derby described the incredible artificial weather that Earthlings sometimes create for other Earthlings when they don't want those other Earthlings to inhabit Earth any more.

Kurt Vonnegut