Quotes from Kurt Vonnegut

What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish that people wouldn't get so mad at them.

What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it.

What war has always been is a puberty ceremony.

He was a graduate of West Point, which is military academy that turns young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.

Luck is not the hand of God.... Luck is the way the wind swirls and the dust settles eons after God has passed by.

It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.

I'd rather have written "Cheers" than anything I've written.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

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.

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren.

Because of the movies nobody will believe that it was babies who fought the war.

all that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a great depression. we may even be hiding a third world war

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

Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a fire engine.

Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

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.

Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.

I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a fire engine.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

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.