Kurt Vonnegut - Man Quotes

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"You think I'm insane?" said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him.
"You're still in touch. I guess that's the test."
"Barely — barely."
"A psychiatrist could help. There's a good man in Albany."
Finnerty shook his head. "He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." He nodded, "Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first."

Kurt Vonnegut
If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.

Kurt Vonnegut
Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people's blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed.

Kurt Vonnegut
It used to be said of a man who had suffered a catastrophic setback in his line of work that he had been handed his head on a platter. We are being handed our heads with tweezers now.

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
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
We Bokonists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon "If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass." At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, "Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass." By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries. It is as free form as an amoeba.

Kurt Vonnegut
It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can't get out of, but I think this is very usual in life. There are people, particularly dumb people, who are in terrible trouble and never get out of it, because they're not intelligent enough. It strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that man can always solve his problems. This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry — or laugh.

Kurt Vonnegut
Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

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
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
And as Paul said these things to himself, a wave of sadness washed over them as though they'd been written in sand. He was understanding now that no man could live without roots—roots in a patch of desert, a red clay field, a mountain slope, a rocky coast, a city street. In black loan, in mud or sand or rock or asphalt or carpet, every man had his roots down deep—in home.

Kurt Vonnegut
It was Trout's fantasy that somebody would be outraged by the footprints. This would give him the opportunity to reply grandly, "What is it that offends you so? I am simply using man's first printing press. You are reading a bold and universal headline which says,'I am here, I am here, I am here.'"

Kurt Vonnegut
He ransacked his memory like a thief going through another man's billfold.

Kurt Vonnegut
Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.

Kurt Vonnegut
Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

Kurt Vonnegut
You couldn't help that you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed — so you were a good man just the same.

Kurt Vonnegut
You go up to a man, and you say, "How are things going, Joe?" and he says, "Oh fine, fine — couldn't be better." And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn't be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody's having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much.

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
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
Don't lecture me on race relations. I don't have a molecule of prejudice. I've been in battle with every kind of man there is. I've been in bed with every kind of woman there is — from a Laplander to a Tierra del Fuegian. If I'd ever been to the South Pole, there'd be a hell of a lot of penguins who looked like me.

Kurt Vonnegut
Sally In The Garden:

Sally in the garden,
Siftin' cinders,
Lifted up her leg,
And farted like a man,
The bursting of her bloomers broke sixteen winders,
The cheeks of her ass went (blam, blam, blam)

Kurt Vonnegut
Doctor Paul Proteus, son of a successful man, himself rich with prospects of being richer, counted his material blessings. He found that he was in excellent shape to afford integrity.

Kurt Vonnegut
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

Kurt Vonnegut
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.

Kurt Vonnegut
There is a riddle about a man who is locked in a room with nothing but a bed and a calendar, and the question is: How does he survive? The answer is: He eats dates from the calendar and drinks from the springs of the bed.

Kurt Vonnegut
What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.

Kurt Vonnegut
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed

Kurt Vonnegut