Quotes from Kurt Vonnegut

History is merely a list of surprises... It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

History! Read it and weep!

the late twentieth century will go down in history, i'm sure, as an era of pharmaceutical buffoonery.

Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.

The computer revolution has allowed white-collar criminals to do what the Mob would have loved to do - put a pawnshop and a loan shark in every home!

The most heartbreakingly beautiful girl I ever hope to see

Human beings are about 1,000 times dumber and meaner than they think they are.

What a bummer it is to be a human being.

No moral value is greater than humanity.

... humanity deserved to die horribly, since it had behaved so cruelly and wastefully on a planet so sweet.

It posed the question posed by all such stone piles.: how had puny men moved stones so big? And, like all such stone piles, it answered the question itself. Dumb terror had moved those stones so big

The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

Humor is an almost physiological response to fear.

We are what we imagine ourselves to be.

The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

I now make my living by being impolite. I am clumsy at it.

I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest.

Thinking doesn't seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe.

I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me.

We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment."

Anyone unable to understand how useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.

What the Gospels actually said was: don't kill anyone until you are absolutely sure they aren't well connected.