Kurt Vonnegut Quotes page 6

“[Vietnam] only made billionaires out of millionaires. [Iraq] is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.”

Breakfast of Champions (1973)

“I tell you, Mr. Constant,” he said genially, “it’s a thankless job, telling people it’s a hard, hard Universe they’re in.”

A Man Without a Country (2005)

“My father said "When in doubt, castle."”

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 1 “Between Timid and Timbuktu” (p. 25)

“Literature is idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines in only twenty-six symbols, ten arabic numbers, and about eight punctuation marks.”

A Man Without a Country (2005)

“Many people found our house spooky, and the attic in fact as full of evil when I was born. It housed a collection of more than three hundred antique and modern firearms. Father had bought them during his and Mother's six-month honeymoon in Europe in 1922. Father thought them beautiful, but they might as well have been copperheads and rattlesnakes. They were murder.”

Public conversation with Lee Stringer, in Like Shaking Hands With God (1999)
Various interviews

Kurt Vonnegut book Deadeye Dick

Deadeye Dick (1982)

“His plan? To pass out weapons to slaves, so they could overthrow their masters. Suicide.”

Kurt Vonnegut book God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999)

“Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie withing every human being, looked outward—pushed ever outward. What mankind hoped to learn in its outward push was who was actually in charge of all creation, and what all creation was all about.”

“Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.”

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 1 “Between Timid and Timbuktu” (p. 7)

“His poor soul was flooded with pleasure as he realized that one friend was all that a man needed in order to be well-supplied with friendship.”

page 19
Breakfast of Champions (1973)

“The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.”

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 11 “We Hate Malachi Constant Because...” (p. 259)

“About astrology and palmistry: They are good because they make people feel vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.”

"In a Manner that Must Shame God Himself"
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1974)

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate 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.”

Bennington College address (1970)

Kurt Vonnegut book Mother Night

Mother Night (1961)

“A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.”

Kurt Vonnegut book God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Opening line of novel.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)

“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.”

“Listen:
The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. "Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?" she asked me.
"The big show is inside my head," I said”

Cold Turkey (2004)

“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”

Breakfast of Champions (1973)

“There was not a country in the world that had not fought a battle in the war of all Earth against the invaders from Mars.
All was forgiven.
All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.”

Kilgore Trout's epitaph
Unsourced paraphrase or variant: We are human only to the extent that our ideas remain humane.
Breakfast of Champions (1973)

“I would say, ‘Is there anything I can do?’—but Skip once told me that that was the most hateful and stupid expression in the English language.”

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 10 “An Age of Miracles” (p. 216)

“In order to get what we've got, Anita, we have, in effect, traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them — the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect.”

Epilogue “Reunion with Stony” (p. 313)
The Sirens of Titan (1959)

Kurt Vonnegut book Player Piano

Source: Player Piano (1952), Chapter 18 (p. 169)

“It is a gruesome Disneyland. Nobody is cute there.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Bluebeard

Bluebeard (1987)

“Fish! Fish! Fish!”

Kurt Vonnegut book Galápagos

Galápagos (1985)

“Busy, busy, busy.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Cat's Cradle

Cat's Cradle (1963)

“When you're dead you're dead.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Mother Night

Introduction (1966)
Mother Night (1961)

“Old Norwegian Proverb: Swedes have short dicks but long memories.”

“During the Vietnam War, Abbie Hoffman announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if this was true or not.”

A Man Without a Country (2005)

“Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

A Man Without a Country (2005)

“Billy coughed when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit thin gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton. This law tells us that for each reaction there is a reaction which is equal and opposite in direction. This can be useful in rocketry.”

Cold Turkey (2004)

Kurt Vonnegut book Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

“Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ’97: Wear sunscreen.”

“About belief or lack of belief in an afterlife: Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddhist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort.
I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead. My German-American ancestors, the earliest of whom settled in our Middle West about the time of our Civil War, called themselves "Freethinkers," which is the same sort of thing. My great grandfather Clemens Vonnegut wrote, for example, "If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?"
I myself have written, "If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake."”

Opening words to a commencement address supposedly given by Vonnegut at M.I.T., but actually based on Mary Schmich's June 1, 1997 column for the Chicago Tribune
Misattributed

Kurt Vonnegut book God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

In A Man Without a Country (2005) p. 80–81 Vonnegut makes a very similar statement:
How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do. "If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?"
But if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being.
I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake.
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999)

“In the nightmare of a warring world, it takes peculiar skills to get along.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Armageddon in Retrospect

Story: "The commandant's desk" - p.193
Armageddon in Retrospect (2008)

“But listen: If anyone here should wind up on a gurney in a lethal-injection facility, maybe the one at Terre Haute, here is what your last words should be: "This will certainly teach me a lesson."”

Kurt Vonnegut book Armageddon in Retrospect

"At Clowes Hall, Indianapolis, April 27 2007" - p.22 [Page numbers per the 2008 Jonathan Cape hardback edition.]
(From a speech written by Kurt Vonnegut before his death but delivered posthumously on his behalf by son Mark Vonnegut.)
Armageddon in Retrospect (2008)

“You must all take instructions from me!”

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”

the conscience shrieks, in effect, to all the other mental processes. The other processes try it for a while, note that the conscience is unappeased, that it continues to shriek, and they note, too, that the outside world has not been even microscopically improved by the unselfish acts the conscience has demanded. They rebel at last. They pitch the tyrannous conscience down an oubliette, weld shut the manhole cover of that dark dungeon. They can hear the conscience no more. In the sweet silence, the mental processes look about for a new leader, and the leader most prompt to appear whenever the conscience is stilled, Enlightened Self-interest, does appear. Enlightened Self-interest gives them a flag, which they adore on sight. It is essentially the black and white Jolly Roger, with these words written beneath the skull and crossbones, 'The hell with you, Jack, I've got mine!"
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)