Kurt Vonnegut citations

Page 7

“C'est évidemment une chose éreintante que d'avoir sans cesse à raisonner dans un univers qui n'a jamais été fait pour être raisonnable.”

“Tout temps est le temps du tout. Il est inaltérable. Il ne se prête ni aux avertissements ni aux raisonnement. Il existe, un point c'est tout.”

“Ce n'est pas parce qu'une chose paraît meilleure qu'une autre qu'elle est bonne pour vous.”

“Tout ce que vous pensez, vous le pensez parce que quelqu'un en a lancé l'idée.”

“Le charme est un truc qui fait que des étrangers apprécient immédiatement quelqu'un et lui font confiance - indépendamment de tout ce que ce charmeur peut avoir en tête.”

“Certains des gens les plus malheureux en ce monde sont aussi parmi les plus intelligents.”

“Le monde moderne se coincerait en grinçant s'il n'existait pas d'hommes assez doués et compétents pour faire fonctionner en douceur les éléments les plus complexes de la civilisation.”

“Le mot pourquoi ne veut rien dire.”

“Personne n'aime à penser qu'on se sert de lui.”

“On ne se trompe jamais en disant au revoir.”

“La force est dans l'absurdité.”

“Les fous, parfois, ne sont pas dépourvus de charme.”

“Quiconque cesse de tirer fierté de son apparence physique ne tarde pas à mourir.”

“Un jeune garçon ne peut pas se passer de son père.”

“Si les souhaits avaient des jambes, tous les crève-la-faim rouleraient carrosse.”

“Chacun de nous doit être ce qu'il ou elle est.”

“Les idées ou l'absence d'idées sont des causes de maladie.”

“La science est une magie qui réussit.”

“Ce n'est pas la taille qui fait qu'un homme est un merdeur, c'est sa façon de penser.”

“Les matériaux qu'un écrivain est appelé à manipuler sont de nature si dangereuse qu'il peut s'attendre à se retrouver à l'agonie en un tournemain s'il ne tient pas sur ses gardes.”

“Les hommes, apparemment par nature, ne peuvent être heureux que lorsqu'ils sont engagés dans des entreprises qui leur font prendre conscience de leur utilité.”

“Les idées vous viennent toujours quand on veut demander quelque chose.”

“Ce n'est qu'une illusion terrestre de croire que les minutes se succèdent comme les grains d'un chapelet et que, une fois disparues, elles le sont pour de bon.”

“Le sexe a encore le pouvoir d'abattre toutes sortes de structures sociales.”

“L'univers, c'est un marché aux puces où chaque objet est surestimé.”

“On peut tout supporter et chacun doit accomplir ce qui lui échoit.”

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

“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?”

“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.””

“That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, "Here's a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but would never do it, of course. It's just fun to think about."
And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it — have slaves fight each other to death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on.”

“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!”

“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.”

“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!”

“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?”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.””

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“He alienated his friends in the sciences by thanking them extravagantly for scientific advances he had read about in the recent newspapers and magazines, by assuring them, with a perfectly straight face, that life was getting better and better, thanks to scientific thinking.”

“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?”

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

“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.”

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

““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.””

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Nothing in this book is true.”

““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.””

“I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.”