Quotes from Kurt Vonnegut

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.

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.

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.

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

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC

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.

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.

Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

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.

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.

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I dont know what can be done to fix it. This is it Only nut cases want to be president.

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand

We are all what we pretend to be, but, we had better be very careful what we pretend.

We are what we imagine ourselves to be.

We are what we pretend to be, but we better be very careful what we pretend.

What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.

Men are jerks. Women are psychotic.

As stupid and vicious as men are, this is a lovely day.

Think of what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.

I have no degree in biochemistry, neither do I have one in mechanical engineering, as the Army saw fit to terminate both courses before they were finished.

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

Back in my days as a chemistry student, I used to be quite a technocrat. I was firmly convinced that scientists would have cornered God and photographed Him in color by 1951.