(Art is) a conspiracy between clever parasites and millionaires to make poor people feel stupid.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who find those lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness. Science has nothing to do with it, friends.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
All time in all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all bugs in amber.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Belief is nearly the whole of the Universe, whether based on truth or not.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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, Jr.
Big, undreamed-of things. The people on the edge see them first.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Dear Future Generations: Please accept our apologies. We were roaring drunk on petroleum.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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, Jr.
Everybody's shaking in his boots, so don't be bluffed.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
History is merely a list of surprises... It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a fire engine.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty- and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The Only Proof He Needed For The Existence Of God Was Music.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
My last words? 'Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.'.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Never index your own book.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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, Jr.
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, Jr.
Round and round and round we spin,
With feet of lead and wings of tin...
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
So it goes.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Suicide is the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Take care of the people, and God almighty will take care of Himself.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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, Jr.
The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The only difference between (George W.) Bush and (Adolf) Hitler is that Hitler was elected.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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, Jr.
There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
True terror is waking up one morning and realizing your high school class is running the country.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
We are here on earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you differently.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Found 56 occurence(s) in 52,553 quotation(s).