Top 1030 Quotes & Sayings by Kurt Vonnegut - Page 2

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

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

I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see.

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milky Way - with a century of transportation whoopee.

During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school.

Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do.

Back in my days as a chemistry student, I used to be quite a technocrat. I was firmly convinced that scientists would have cornered God and photographed Him in color by 1951.

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth.

I now make my living by being impolite. I am clumsy at it.

Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.

If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.

I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

I'm convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

When I'm being funny, I try not to offend. I don't think much of what I've done has been in really ghastly taste. I don't think I have embarrassed many people or distressed them.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment.

Actually, to be an effective person politically in this country, I think you have to be thirty or over, and also you have to be rich, well-placed, you have to be close to power. And I don't think that young people, because they look young, can do much, as I think they are counterproductive.

It is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.

I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It's as though I had taken over the family Esso station.

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

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

A chaplain's assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the American Army.

My cash cows, the slick magazines, were put out of business by TV.

I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.

People are only animals, but special animals. Every animal has fought and killed to survive, even before the dinosaurs. We're the only ones that do it for fun. That's why I don't know about Darwinism. Supposedly evolution and natural selection are all about survival, but we haven't gotten smarter over the years, only more dangerous.

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."

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.

Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

I'd like to teach Iraq about Democracy because we're so experienced with it. First they should know that after 100 years they should free their slaves. Then after 150 years they should give their women the right to vote. Oh, and of course when they start it all they should begin with some genocide and ethnic cleansing.

If I were a physics teacher or a science teacher, it'd be on my mind all the time as how the hell we really got this way. It's a perfectly natural human thought and, okay, if you go into the science class you can't think this. Well, alright, as soon as you leave you can start thinking about it again without giving aid and comfort to the lunatic fringe of the Christian religion.

Unannounced changes in life's itinerary are like dancing lessons from God.

I don't know what's going on, and I'm probably not smart enough to understand if somebody was to explain it to me. All I know is we're being tested somehow, by somebody or some thing a whole lot smarter than us, and all I can do is be friendly and keep calm and try and have a nice time till it's over.

I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.

Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. "Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

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

Laughing is good exercise. It's like jogging on the inside.

A society is only as healthy as its ideas are humane.

Hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide.

We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.

1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

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.

Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.

Nietzsche had a little one-liner on how to choose a wife. He said, ''Are you willing to have a conversation with this woman for the next forty years?'' That's how to pick a wife.

It's a terrible waste to be happy and not notice it.

You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.

Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.

Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves... It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.

The secret to success in any human endeavor is total concentration.

And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.

And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference.