Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan (1959)

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

Kurt Vonnegut
I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

Kurt Vonnegut
Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules — and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

Kurt Vonnegut
I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm, and I can see I'm doing good, and them I'm doing good for know I'm doing it, and they love me, Unk, as best they can. I found me a home.

Kurt Vonnegut
His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand — passive resistance and open displays of contempt.

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

Kurt Vonnegut
Everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been.

Kurt Vonnegut
It is always pitiful when any human being falls into a condition hardly more respectable than that of an animal. How much more pitiful it is when the person who falls has had all the advantages!

Kurt Vonnegut
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
Now, you can say your Daddy is right and the other little child's Daddy is wrong, but the universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.

Kurt Vonnegut
The name of the new religion," said Rumfoord, "is The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.

Kurt Vonnegut
The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody.

Kurt Vonnegut
Life for a punctual person is like a roller coaster. All kinds of things are going to happen to you! Sure, I can see the whole roller coaster you're on. And sure — I could give you a piece of paper that would tell you about every dip and turn, warn you about every bogeyman that was going to pop out at you in the tunnels. But that wouldn't help you any. Because you'd still have to take the roller-coaster ride, I didn't design the roller coaster, I don't own it, and I don't say who rides and who doesn't. I just know what it's shaped like.

Kurt Vonnegut
The lieutenant-colonel realized for the first time what most people never realize about themselves - that he was not only a victim of outrageous fortune, hilt one of outrageous fortune's cruelest agents as well.

Kurt Vonnegut
The crowd, having been promised nothing, felt cheated, having received nothing.

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
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
Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.

Kurt Vonnegut
Son — they say there isn't any royalty in this country, but do you want me to tell you how to be king of the United States of America? Just fall through the hole in a privy and come out smelling like a rose.

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 big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.

Kurt Vonnegut
It was a marvelous engine for doing violence to the spirit of thousands of laws without actually running afoul of so much as a city ordinance.

Kurt Vonnegut
The Earthlings behaved at all times as though there were a big eye in the sky—as though that big eye were ravenous for entertainment.

Kurt Vonnegut
That is the first thing I know for sure: (1.) If the questions don't make sense, neither will the answers.

Kurt Vonnegut
All was forgiven. All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.

Kurt Vonnegut