Kurt Vonnegut - People Quotes

98 Sourced Quotes

View all Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
"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
About astrology and palmistry: They are good because they make people feel vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

Kurt Vonnegut
Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.

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
Profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

Kurt Vonnegut
I figured things would be better in Washington, that I'd find a lot of people I admired and belonged with. Washington is worse, Paul—Ilium to the tenth power. Stupid, arrogant, self-congratulatory, unimaginative, humorless men. And the women, Paul—the dull wives feeding on the power and glory of their husbands.

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
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
The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren't and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why.

Kurt Vonnegut
The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.

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
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
Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galapagos Islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next — and on and on.

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
Take Care of the People, and God Almighty Will Take Care of Himself.

Kurt Vonnegut
The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.

Kurt Vonnegut
People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

Kurt Vonnegut
Don't you think that's the main reason people find [writing] so difficult? If they can write complete sentences and can use a dictionary, isn't that the only reason they find writing hard: they don't know or care about anything?

Kurt Vonnegut
That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, "Here's a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but would never do it, of course. It's just fun to think about."
And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it — have slaves fight each other to death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on.

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
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
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
Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

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
Many people need desperately to receive this message: "I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone."

Kurt Vonnegut