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Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was an American writer. In a career spanning over 50 years, Vonnegut published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of non-fiction, with further collections being published after his death. He is most famous for his darkly satirical, best-selling novel Slaughterhouse-Five .

Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but dropped out in January 1943 and enlisted in the United States Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden and survived the Allied bombing of the city by taking refuge in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had three children. He later adopted his sister's three sons, after she died of cancer and her husband was killed in a train accident.

Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. The novel was reviewed positively but was not commercially successful. In the nearly 20 years that followed, Vonnegut published several novels that were only marginally successful, such as Cat's Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater . Vonnegut's breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. The book's anti-war sentiment resonated with its readers amidst the ongoing Vietnam War and its reviews were generally positive. After its release, Slaughterhouse-Five went to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list, thrusting Vonnegut into fame. He was invited to give speeches, lectures and commencement addresses around the country and received many awards and honors.

Later in his career, Vonnegut published several autobiographical essays and short-story collections, including Fates Worse Than Death , and A Man Without a Country . After his death, he was hailed as a morbidly comical commentator on the society in which he lived and as one of the most important contemporary writers. Vonnegut's son Mark published a compilation of his father's unpublished compositions, titled Armageddon in Retrospect. In 2017, Seven Stories Press published Complete Stories, a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction including five previously unpublished stories. Complete Stories was collected and introduced by Vonnegut friends and scholars Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield. Numerous scholarly works have examined Vonnegut's writing and humor. Wikipedia  

✵ 11. November 1922 – 11. April 2007   •   Other names Vonegut, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Kurt Vonnegut photo
Kurt Vonnegut: 318   quotes 348   likes

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

“And the city was lovely, highly ornamented, like Paris, and untouched by war. It was supposedly an “open” city, not to be attacked since there were no troop concentrations or war industries there. But high explosives were dropped on Dresden by American and British planes on the night of February 13, 1945, just about twenty-one years ago, as I now write. There were no particular targets for the bombs. The hope was that they would create a lot of kindling and drive firemen underground. And then tens of thousands of tiny incendiaries were scattered over the kindling, like seeds on freshly turned loam. More bombs were dropped to keep firemen in their holes, and all the little fires grew, joined one another, became one apocalyptic flame. Hey presto: fire storm. It was the largest massacre in European history, by the way. … Everything was gone but the cellars where 135,000 Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Mother Night

Introduction (1966)
Mother Night (1961)

Love , Men , War , Hope

“Which brings us to the arts, whose purpose, in common with astrology, is to use frauds in order 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 inside. And on and on.”

Kurt Vonnegut

Bennington College address (1970)

Love , People , Books , Art

“He ransacked his memory like a thief going through another man’s billfold.”

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 1 “Between Timid and Timbuktu” (p. 22)

Memory

“Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to.”

Kurt Vonnegut book God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999)

Women , People

“I don't think there would be many jokes, if there weren't constant frustration and fear and so forth. It's a response to bad troubles like crime.”

Kurt Vonnegut

Interview Public Radio International (October 2006)
Various interviews

Fear , Thinking

“It was an appalling thought, to be so well-integrated into the machinery of society and history as to be able to move in only one plane, and along one line.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Player Piano

Source: Player Piano (1952), Chapter 4 (p. 41)

History

“All people are insane," he said. "They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Mother Night

Mother Night (1961)

God , People , Time , Help

“If facts weren't funny, or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Hocus Pocus

Hocus Pocus (1990)

“I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled “Science Fiction” … and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”

Kurt Vonnegut

"Science Fiction"; originally published in The New York Times Book Review, 5 September 1965
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1974)

Science

“To be
the eyes
and ears
and conscience
of the Creator of the Universe,
you fool.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Breakfast of Champions

Kilgore Trout's unwritten reply to the question "What is the purpose of life?"
Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Fools , Universe

“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

As quoted in The Observer [London] (27 December 1987)
Various interviews

Thinking

“Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Hocus Pocus

Hocus Pocus (1990)

People , Hope , Beer

“It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.”

Kurt Vonnegut

Paragraph 78 (p. 13 of Welcome to the Monkey House)
Welcome to the Monkey House (1968), "Harrison Bergeron" (1961)

Gauge , Dead

“The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.”

Kurt Vonnegut

Preface
Welcome to the Monkey House (1968)

Health , Suicide

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Mother Night

Introduction (1966)
Sometimes misquoted as: Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.
Mother Night (1961)

Attitude , Leadership , Life , Heart Touching

“Is it possible that seemingly incredible geniuses like Bach and Shakespeare and Einstein were not in fact superhuman, but simply plagiarists, copying great stuff from the future?”

Kurt Vonnegut book A Man Without a Country

A Man Without a Country (2005)

Future

“Ta ta and adios. Or, as Saint Peter said to me with a sly wink, when I told him I was on my last-round trip to Paradise: “See you later, Alligator.””

Kurt Vonnegut book God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999)

“I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me!”

Kurt Vonnegut book Mother Night

Mother Night (1961)

Hate , People , World , Hope

“As in my other works of fiction: All persons living and dead are purely coincidental, and should not be construed. No names have been changed in order to protect the innocent. Angels protect the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Bagombo Snuff Box

Bagombo Snuff Box (1999)

Angels , Change , Personality , Dead

“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 book The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 2 “Cheers in the Wirehouse” (p. 52)

Animals , Personality

“If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative. What could be simpler?”

Kurt Vonnegut

Cold Turkey (2004)

Love

“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 book The Sirens of Titan

Opening epigram
The Sirens of Titan (1959)

“She was an alcoholic. I didn't blame myself for that. The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Hocus Pocus

Hocus Pocus (1990)

Life , Alcohol , Problem

“During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Hocus Pocus

Hocus Pocus (1990)

“The most useful thing I could do before this meeting is to keel over. On the other hand, artists are keeling over by the thousands every day and nobody seems to pay the least attention.”

Kurt Vonnegut

Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1974)

“That was the strength of the Nazis," she said. "They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make him stay away.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Jailbird

Jailbird (1979)

God

“While we were being bombed in Dresden, sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one slider said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, “I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.””

Kurt Vonnegut book A Man Without a Country

Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it.
A Man Without a Country (2005)

People , Night

“I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy — because we’re experienced with it, you know. And, in democracy, after a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go. And, after a hundred and fifty years, you have to let your women vote. And, at the beginning of democracy, is that quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite okay. And that’s what’s going on now.”

Kurt Vonnegut

Interviewed by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=18090&title=kurt-vonnegut/ (13 September 2005)
Various interviews

Women , Democracy

“Anita had the mechanics of marriage down pat, even to the subtlest conventions. If her approach was disturbingly rational, systematic, she was thorough enough to turn out a credible counterfeit of warmth.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Player Piano

Source: Player Piano (1952), Chapter 1 (p. 25)

Marriage

“I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Alcohol , Disease , Night

“What does “A. D.” signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that. Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person?”

Kurt Vonnegut

Cold Turkey (2004)

People , Way , Imagination , Personality

“I can have oodles of charm when I want to.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Breakfast of Champions

page 20
Breakfast of Champions (1973)

“Requiem:The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do."The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.”

Kurt Vonnegut book A Man Without a Country

A Man Without a Country (2005)

People , Forgiveness , Sense

“Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.”

Kurt Vonnegut

I Love You, Madame Librarian (2004)

““Thank God!” said Unk.
Redwine raised his eyebrows quizzically. “Why?” he said.
“Pardon me?” said Unk.
“Why thank God?” said Redwine. “He doesn’t care what happens to you. He didn’t go to any trouble to get you here safe and sound, any more than He would go to the trouble to kill you.””

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 10 “An Age of Miracles” (p. 226)

God

“Teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Children , Imagination , Teachers , Joy

“You were sick, but now you're well, and there's work to do.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Timequake

Kilgore's Creed
Timequake (1997)

“Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get there again.”

Kurt Vonnegut

As quoted in "The World according to Kurt" http://web.archive.org/web/20051018012956/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20051011.wxvonnegut11/BNStory/Entertainment/ in Globe and Mail [Toronto] (11 October 2005)
Various interviews

Dogs , Way , Home , Cats

“Nothing in this book is true.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Cat's Cradle

Cat's Cradle (1963)

Books

““This husband of yours, he’d rather have his wife a— Rather, have her—” Halyard cleared his throat— “than go into public relations?”
“I’m proud to say,” said the girl, “that he’s one of the few men on earth with a little self-respect left.””

Kurt Vonnegut book Player Piano

Source: Player Piano (1952), Chapter 24 (p. 234)

Men , Girl

“It was in the nature of truly effective good-luck pieces that human beings never really owned them.”

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 12 “The Gentleman from Tralfamadore” (p. 301)

Nature

“You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff. You're not expecting it.”

Kurt Vonnegut book A Man Without a Country

A Man Without a Country (2005)

Truth

“Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!”

Kurt Vonnegut

I Love You, Madame Librarian (2004)

“In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.”

Kurt Vonnegut

I Love You, Madame Librarian (2004)

Hate , World , Fear

“Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Mother Night

Mother Night (1961)

Way

“As far as I’m concerned,” said Constant, “the Universe is a junk yard, with everything in it overpriced. I am through poking around in the junk heaps, looking for bargains. Every so-called bargain,” said Constant, “has been connected by fine wires to a dynamite bouquet.”

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 12 “The Gentleman from Tralfamadore” (p. 290)

Universe

“Everybody's shaking in his boots, so don't be bluffed.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Player Piano

Source: Player Piano (1952), Chapter 22 (p. 219)

“What is it, what can it possibly be about blowjobs and golf?”

Kurt Vonnegut book A Man Without a Country

Martian Visitor
A Man Without a Country (2005)

“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.”

Kurt Vonnegut book God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Chapter 1 Page 4 http://miltonthed.weebly.com/uploads/1/4/1/6/14162844/vonnegut_kurt_-_god_bless_you_mr_rosewater.pdf
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)

Stupidity , Peace , Law , Dreams