Kurt Vonnegut citations

Page 8

“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.”

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

“This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.”

“Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“People hate it when they're tickled because laughter is not pleasant, if it goes on too long. I think it's a desperate sort of convulsion in desperate circumstances, which helps a little.”

“Why throw money at problems? That's what money is for.
Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.”

“Don't lecture me on race relations. I don't have a molecule of prejudice. I've been in battle with every kind of man there is. I've been in bed with every kind of woman there is — from a Laplander to a Tierra del Fuegian. If I'd ever been to the South Pole, there'd be a hell of a lot of penguins who looked like me.”

“Well, I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president.”

“If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now."”

“Eliza and I composed a precocious critique of the Constitution of the United States of America … We argued that is was as good a scheme for misery as any, since its success in keeping the common people reasonably happy and proud depended on the strength of the people themselves — and yet it prescribed no practical machinery which would tend to make the people, as opposed to their elected representatives, strong.
We said it was possible that the framers of the Constitution were blind to the beauty of persons who were without great wealth or powerful friends or public office, but who were nonetheless genuinely strong.
We thought it was more likely, though, that their framers had not noticed that it was natural, and therefore almost inevitable, that human beings in extraordinary and enduring situations should think of themselves of composing new families. Eliza and I pointed out that this happened no less in democracies than in tyrannies, since human beings were the same the wide world over, and civilized only yesterday.
Elected representatives, hence, could be expected to become members of the famous and powerful family of elected representatives — which would, perfectly naturally, make them wary and squeamish and stingy with respect to all the other sorts of families which, again, perfectly naturally, subdivided mankind.
Eliza and I … proposed that the Constitution be amended so as to guarantee that every citizen, no matter how humble, or crazy or incompetent or deformed, somehow be given membership in some family as covertly xenophobic and crafty as the one their public servants formed.”

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers — joined in the serious business of keeping our food, shelter, clothing and loved ones from combining with oxygen.”

“Drawn crudely in the dust of three window-panes were a swastika, a hammer and sickle, and the Stars and Stripes. I had drawn the three symbols weeks before, at the conclusion of an argument about patriotism with Kraft. I had given a hearty cheer for each symbol, demonstrating to Kraft the meaning of patriotism to, respectively, a Nazi, a Communist, and an American. "Hooray, hooray, hooray," I'd said.”

“It is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln. He always steals the show.”

“The new heroism — put a village idiot into a pressure cooker, seal it up tight, and shoot him at the moon.”

“All the things you are are going to be sued and sued successfully. And, while the litigants may not be able to get blood from turnips, they can certainly ruin the turnips in the process of trying.”

“You go up to a man, and you say, ‘How are things going, Joe?’ And he says, ‘Oh fine, fine—couldn’t be better.’ And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn’t be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody’s having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much.”

“Make love when you can. It's good for you.”

“What do I myself think of this particular book? I feel lousy about it, but I always feel lousy about my books.”

“[Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife] is for me a secretly deep history of a generation of middle-class American males, my own, which was taught by parents and athletic coaches and scoutmasters and military chaplains and quack doctors and so on to be deeply ashamed of masturbation and wet dreams.
And the hidden plea in the book is one which first appeared in my eyes when I was fourteen, say, and which has not vanished entirely to this day. It is part of the mystery of me. The plea is addressed by old-fashioned males forever full of jism to any pretty human female, on the street, in a magazine, in a movie — anywhere. The plea is this: "Please, pretty lady, don't make me play with my private parts again."”

“What is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?”

“Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?”

“Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people’s blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed.
“Every failure of Earthling leadership has been traceable to a lack on the part of the leader,” says Rumfoord, “of at least one of these three things.”

“I know that millions of dollars have been spent to produce this splendid graduating class, and that the main hope of your teachers was, once they got through with you, that you would no longer be superstitious. I'm sorry — I have to undo that now. I beg you to believe in the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or the frustrator of the grandest dreams of God Almighty.
If you can believe that, and make others believe it, then there might be hope for us. Human beings might stop treating each other like garbage, might begin to treasure and protect each other instead. Then it might be all right to have babies again.”

“Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end,
And our God will take things back that He to us did lend.
And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,
Why go right ahead and scold Him. He'll just smile and nod.”