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Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut


Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.
– Kurt Vonnegut
All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
– Kurt Vonnegut
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.
– Kurt Vonnegut
I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
– Kurt Vonnegut
I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.
– Kurt Vonnegut
I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.
– Kurt Vonnegut
If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.
– Kurt Vonnegut
If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
– Kurt Vonnegut
It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
– 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
People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.
– Kurt Vonnegut
People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. 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 do not care about them. You are not alone.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.
– Kurt Vonnegut
This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
– Kurt Vonnegut
To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.
– Kurt Vonnegut
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
– Kurt Vonnegut
We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
– Kurt Vonnegut
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
– Kurt Vonnegut
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to have 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
One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
– Kurt Vonnegut
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Well, the telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
– Kurt Vonnegut
About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.
– Kurt Vonnegut