kurt-vonnegut

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
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Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I want to stand 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, Player Piano
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And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
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Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
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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
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We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
Kurt Vonnegut
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And so it goes...
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
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Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
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And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
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If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
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Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.
Kurt Vonnegut
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A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan
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The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.
Kurt Vonnegut
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And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
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Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.
Kurt Vonnegut
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How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
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I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
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Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.
Kurt Vonnegut
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1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.
Kurt Vonnegut
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True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
Kurt Vonnegut
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And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
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Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
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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
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To be is to do - Socrates

To do is to be - Sartre

Do Be Do Be Do - Sinatra
Kurt Vonnegut
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Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.
Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
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The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.
Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast Of Champions
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I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
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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?
Kurt Vonnegut
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In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in his cosmic loneliness.

And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat, looked around, and spoke. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely.

"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.

"Certainly," said man.

"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.

And He went away.
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
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Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
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I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.
Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan
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A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.
Kurt Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House
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When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as Ive said before, bugs in amber.
Kurt Vonnegut
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All this happened, more or less.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
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Anyway -- because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next -- and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis -- at any time of night or day.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Science is magic that works.
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
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If you can do no good, at least do no harm.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick or Lonesome No More!
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Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.
Kurt Vonnegut
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What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go around looking for it, and I think it can be poisonous. I wish people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, 'Please-a little less love, and a little more common decency.
Kurt Vonnegut
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They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
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I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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
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If somebody says "I love you" to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? "I love you, too.
Kurt Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
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I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn't have to write at all anymore if I didn't want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I dont know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they're through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn't ask to be flowers and I didn't ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five...I had a shutting-off feeling...that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I wanted all things to seem to make some sense,
So we could all be happy, yes, instead of tense.
And I made up lies, so
they all fit nice,
and I made this sad world
a paradise
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
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Make love when you can. It's good for you.
Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
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Smoking is the only honorable form of suicide.
Kurt Vonnegut
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All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!
Kurt Vonnegut
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You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too. And you've got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird
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Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
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Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think that money was so valuable?
Kurt Vonnegut
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Here is a lesson in creative writing.

First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I'm kidding.

For instance, join the National Guard or the Marines and teach democracy. I'm kidding.

We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding.

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
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- Why me?
- That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?
- Yes.
- Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
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Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
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No good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.
Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
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There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
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Just because you can read, write and do a little math, doesn't mean that you're entitled to conquer the universe.
Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
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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
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There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
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In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appalling powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed.
In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazi's once were.
And with good reason.
In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound 'em and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all we want.
Piece of cake.
In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.
Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.
Piece of cake.
The O'Reilly Factor.
So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago paper called "In These Times."
Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic "New York Times" guaranteed there were weapons of destruction there.
Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn't even seen the First World War. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.
Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?
Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people too. I am a veteran of the Second World War and I have to say this is the not the first time I surrendered to a pitiless war machine.
My last words? "Life is no way to treat and animal, not even a mouse."
Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!
Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.
What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?
Kurt Vonnegut,A Man Without a Country
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I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer."

"What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?
Kurt Vonnegut,Cat's Cradle
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All right - I'll tell you what you did for me: you went for happy, silly, beautiful walks with me.
Kurt Vonnegut,Bluebeard
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Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.
Kurt Vonnegut,Cat's Cradle
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That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.
Kurt Vonnegut,Slaughterhouse-Five
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We could have saved [the Earth] but we were too damned cheap.
Kurt Vonnegut
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All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.
Kurt Vonnegut,Slaughterhouse-Five
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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,Cat's Cradle
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Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.
Kurt Vonnegut
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We'd been apart so long--I'd been dead so long," she said in English. "I thought surely you'd built a new life, with no room in it for me. I'd hoped that."
"My life is nothing but room for you." I said. "It could never be filled by anyone but you.
Kurt Vonnegut,Mother Night
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Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.
Kurt Vonnegut,Cat's Cradle
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She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.
Kurt Vonnegut,Slaughterhouse-Five
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There are too many of us and we are all too far apart.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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
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Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.
Kurt Vonnegut,Slaughterhouse-Five
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God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to always tell the difference.
Kurt Vonnegut,Slaughterhouse-Five
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No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's . . ."
"And?"
"No damn cat, and no damn cradle.
Kurt Vonnegut,Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle
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We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.
Kurt Vonnegut,Breakfast of Champions
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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,Cat's Cradle
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It was not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do without love.
It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him.
What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity.
Now even that had flickered out.
How long I stood frozen there, I cannot say. If I was ever going to move again, someone else was going to have to furnish the reason for moving.
Somebody did.
A policeman watched me for a while, and then he came over to me, and he said, "You alright?"
Yes," I said.
You've been standing here a long time," he said.
I know," I said.
You waiting for somebody?" he said.
No," I said.
Better move on, don't you think?" he said.
Yes, sir," I said.
And I moved on.
Kurt Vonnegut,Mother Night
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If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Ting-a-ling mother fucker.
Kurt Vonnegut,Timequake
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All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I can have oodles of charm when I want to.
Kurt Vonnegut,Breakfast of Champions
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Karl Marx got a bum rap. All he was trying to do was figure out how to take care of a whole lot of people. Of course, socialism is just evil now. Its completely discredited, supposedly, by the collapse of the Soviet Union. I cant help noticing that my grandchildren are heavily in hock to communist China now, which is evidently a whole lot better at business than we are. You talk about the collapse of communism or the Soviet Union. My goodness, this country collapsed in 1929. I mean it crashed, big time, and capitalism looked like a very poor idea.
Kurt Vonnegut
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If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.
Kurt Vonnegut,Timequake
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No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious & charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.
Kurt Vonnegut,A Man Without a Country
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Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.
Kurt Vonnegut,Breakfast of Champions
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Round and round we spin, with feet of lead and wings of tin.
Kurt Vonnegut,Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle
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We are what we imagine ourselves to be. 
Kurt Vonnegut
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Maturity...is knowing what your limitations are...Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.
Kurt Vonnegut,Cat's Cradle
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If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?
Kurt Vonnegut
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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.
Kurt Vonnegut,Breakfast of Champions
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She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.
Kurt Vonnegut,Cat's Cradle
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Until you die .. it's all life.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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
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The letter said that they were two feet high, and green., and shaped like plumber's friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely flexible, usually pointed to the sky. At the top of each shaft was a little hand with a green eye in its palm. The creatures were friendly, and they could see in four dimensions. They pitied Earthlings for being able to see only three. They had many wonderful things to teach Earthlings, especially about time. Billy promised to tell what some of those wonderful things were in his next letter.
Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was published. The second letter started out like this:
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "so it goes.
Kurt Vonnegut,Slaughterhouse-Five
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Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
Kurt Vonnegut,Hocus Pocus
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The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?"
It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.
This is it: "Nothing.
Kurt Vonnegut,Cat's Cradle
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The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Kurt Vonnegut,The Sirens of Titan
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You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do.
Kurt Vonnegut,Timequake
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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,Cat's Cradle
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I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.
Kurt Vonnegut,Slaughterhouse-Five
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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,The Sirens of Titan
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Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.
Kurt Vonnegut,Breakfast of Champions
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Life is no way to treat an animal.
Kurt Vonnegut,A Man Without a Country
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Be patient, Ophelia.

Love,
Hamlet
Kurt Vonnegut
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People arent supposed to look back. Im certainly not going to do it anymore.
Kurt Vonnegut,Slaughterhouse-Five
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The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody.
Kurt Vonnegut,The Sirens of Titan
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A saint is a person who behaves decently in a shockingly indecent society.
Kurt Vonnegut,A Man Without a Country
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It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.
Kurt Vonnegut,Slaughterhouse-Five
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If I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.
Kurt Vonnegut,Slaughterhouse-Five
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Self-taught, are you?" Julian Castle asked Newt.
"Isn't everybody?" Newt inquired.
"Very good answer.
Kurt Vonnegut,Cat's Cradle
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There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.
Kurt Vonnegut,Slaughterhouse-Five
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And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.
Kurt Vonnegut,Player Piano
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To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.
Kurt Vonnegut,A Man Without a Country
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I've often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they're on, why they don't fall off it, how much time they've probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on. I tried to write one once. It was called Welcome to Earth. But I got stuck on explaining why we don't fall off the planet. Gravity is just a word. It doesn't explain anything. If I could get past gravity, I'd tell them how we reproduce, how long we've been here, apparently, and a little bit about evolution. I didn't learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It's also a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it.
Kurt Vonnegut
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If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness.
Kurt Vonnegut,Hocus Pocus
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Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?
Kurt Vonnegut,Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
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Artists use frauds 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.
Kurt Vonnegut,Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
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God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the
sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look
around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly
couldn't have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to
think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and
look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait...
To find out for certain what my wampeter was...
And who was in my karass...
And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.
Kurt Vonnegut,Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle
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I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for--to find out how much a man could take without breaking.
Kurt Vonnegut,Breakfast of Champions
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The truth is, we know so little about life, we don't really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.
Kurt Vonnegut,A Man Without a Country
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What's the point of being alive," she said, "if you're not going to communicate?
Kurt Vonnegut,Bluebeard
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It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:  American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England.  Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames.  The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes.  The containers were stored neatly in racks.  The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes.  They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair.  Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals.   Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work.  The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas.  It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.  The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids.  And Hitler turned into a baby.
Kurt Vonnegut,Slaughterhouse-Five
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My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdales department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.
Kurt Vonnegut
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It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.
Kurt Vonnegut,Slaughterhouse-Five
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in nonsense is strength
Kurt Vonnegut,Breakfast of Champions
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The insane, on occasion, are not without their charms.
Kurt Vonnegut
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No art is possible without a dance with death.
Kurt Vonnegut
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That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody's whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that being alive is a crock of shit.
Kurt Vonnegut,Timequake
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People say there are no atheists in foxholes. A lot of people think this is a good argument against atheism. Personally, I think it's a much better argument against foxholes.
Kurt Vonnegut
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What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I said I wasn't interested, and she was bright enough to say that she wasn't really interested either. As things turned out, we both overestimated our apathies, but not that much.
Kurt Vonnegut,Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle
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You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everythingand I advise you to do the same.
Kurt Vonnegut,Cat's Cradle
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It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?
Kurt Vonnegut,Slaughterhouse-Five
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I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.
Kurt Vonnegut,Timequake
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Only in books do we learn whats really going on.
Kurt Vonnegut,A Man Without a Country
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I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale."
George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot . . .
PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose! . . .
So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.
They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reasons that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club andIn These Times, and kiss my ass!
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,A Man Without a Country
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Everything about life is a joke. Don't you know that?
Kurt Vonnegut,Bluebeard
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All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
Kurt Vonnegut,Timequake
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It's the emptiest and yet the fullest of all human messages: 'Good-bye.
Kurt Vonnegut,Bluebeard
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There are plenty of good reasons for fighting...but no good reason to ever hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty 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....it's that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.
Kurt Vonnegut,Mother Night
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Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Kurt Vonnegut,Bagombo Snuff Box
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All time is 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, as I've said before, bugs in amber.
Kurt Vonnegut,Slaughterhouse-Five
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As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.
Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tis-sues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.
And so on.Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.
Kurt Vonnegut,Breakfast of Champions
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I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.
Kurt Vonnegut,Slaughterhouse-Five
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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,God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
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How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
Kurt Vonnegut,Cat's Cradle
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If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, 'Kurt is up in heaven now.' That's my favorite joke.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Here's the news: I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only twelve years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown & Williamson have promised to kill me.
But I am eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.
Kurt Vonnegut,A Man Without a Country
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The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.
Kurt Vonnegut,Breakfast of Champions
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Women are so useless and unimaginative, aren't they? All they ever think of planting in the dirt is the seed of something beautiful or edible. The only missile they can ever think of throwing at anybody is a ball or a bridal bouquet.
Kurt Vonnegut,Bluebeard
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New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
Kurt Vonnegut,Breakfast of Champions
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He was talking about the sign that said 'THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.'
'All  knew was that I didn't want my daughter or anybody's child to see a message that negative every time she comes into the library,' he said. 'And then I found out it was you who was responsible for it.'
'What's so negative about it?' I said.
'What could be a more negative word than "futility"?' he said.
'"Ignorance,"' I said.
Kurt Vonnegut,Hocus Pocus
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You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.
Kurt Vonnegut
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There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.
Kurt Vonnegut,Slaughterhouse Five
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When everything was beautiful and nothing hurt...
Kurt Vonnegut,Slaughterhouse-Five
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You realize, of course, that everything I say is horseshit.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Well finish your story anyway."

Where was I?"

The bubonic plague. The bulldozer was stalled by corpses."

Oh, yes. Anyway, one sleepless night I stayed up with Father while he worked. It was all we could do to find a live patient to treat. In bed after bed after bed we found dead people.

And Father started giggling," Castle continued.

He couldn't stop. He walked out into the night with his flashlight. He was still giggling. He was making the flashlight beam dance over all the dead people stacked outside. He put his hand on my head and do you know what that marvelous man said to me?" asked Castle.

Nope."

'Son,' my father said to me, 'someday this will all be yours.
Kurt Vonnegut
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When a couple has an argument nowadays  they may think it s about money or power or sex or how to raise the kids or whatever. What they're really saying to each other, though without realizing it, is this: "You are not enough people!
Kurt Vonnegut,A Man Without a Country
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I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Fucking was how babies were made.
Kurt Vonnegut,Breakfast of Champions
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I can't tell if you're serious or not,' said the driver.
I won't know myself until I find out if life is serious or not,' said Trout. 'It's dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot.  That doesn't necessarily mean it's serious, too.
Kurt Vonnegut,Breakfast of Champions
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American humorist Kin Hubbard said , "It ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be". The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?"

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue... Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.

Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
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Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick or Lonesome No More!
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That's the point. Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. So people getting married think they're wonderful, and that they're going to have a baby-- that's wonderful, when actually they're as ugly as rhinoceroses. Just because we think we're so wonderful doesn't mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.
Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
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I still catch myself feeling sad about things that dont matter anymore.
Kurt Vonnegut
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