Kurt Vonnegut Jr Quotes

The discovery of the chrono-synclastic infundibula said to mankind in effect: "What makes you think you're going anywhere? ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

There's many a slip betwixt the cup and the lip. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.
So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought.
The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.
And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections! ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

As a kid I was the youngest member of my family, and the youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation. My sister was five years older than I was, my brother was nine years older than I was, and my parents were both talkers. So at the dinner table when I was very young, I was boring to all those other people. They did not want to hear about the dumb childish news of my days. They wanted to talk about really important stuff that happened in high school or maybe in college or at work. So the only way I could get into a conversation was to say something funny. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

TV is an eraser. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The horse jumped over the fucking fence. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

This was in a country where everybody was expected to pay his own bills for everything, and one of the most expensive things a person could do was get sick. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Its basic axiom is to be followed by individuals as well as great nations, by Losers and Winners alike. We have demonstrated the workability of the axiom in Vietnam, in Bangladesh, in Biafra, in Palestinian refugee camps, in our own ghettos, in our migrant labor camps, on our Indian reservations, in our institutions for the defective and the deformed and the aged. This is it: Ignore agony. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Little Newt snorted. "Religion!"
"Beg your pardon?" Castle said.
"See the cat?" asked Newt. "See the cradle? ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Unhappy failures need not apply. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Dammit, you've got to be kind. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

and she said, 'So there you are!' She asked Frank what he thought he was doing, and he said, 'Experimenting.' That's what Frank always used to say when people asked him what he thought he was doing. He always said, 'Experimenting.'

(p. 15) ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Fern showed him an organizational plan that had the name Magnum Opus, Incorporated. It was a marvelous engine for doing violence to the spirit of thousands of laws without actually running afoul of so much as a city ordinance. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

It's fresh to you because you're too young to know anything but the way things are now.
Actually, it is kind of incredible that things were ever any other way, isn't it? ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

My wife thinks I think I'm such hot stuff. She's wrong. I don't think I'm such hot stuff.

My hero George Bernard Shaw, socialist, and shrewd and funny playwright, said in his eighties that if he was considered smart, he sure pitied people who were considered dumb. He said that, having lived as long as he had, he was at last sufficiently wise to serve as a reasonably competent office boy.

That's how I feel. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The white men wouldn't do it either, of course. They called it women's work, and the women called it Nigger work. *** ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I do realize that I am a very slow realizer. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

We rolled apart…. We spoke coherently to each other for the first time since bedding down. "Hello," she said. "Hello," I said. "Welcome home," she said. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I love you, Eliza," I said.
She thought about it. "No," she said at last, "I don't like it."
"Why not?" I said.
"It's as though you were pointing a gun at my head," she said. "It's just a way of getting somebody to say something they probably don't mean. What else can I say, or anybody say, but, 'I love you, too'? ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

What can I call a coincidence like that but the Hand of God? ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Body sizes can be remarkable for their variations from accepted norms, but still explain almost nothing about the lives led inside those bodies. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I guess all the excitement in bed had more to do with excitement about keeping the human race going than anybody ever imagined. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I was speechless. Never had I dreamed that the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America and the enchanting technology of a motion-picture camera would be combined to form such an atrocity. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I thought the worst of everyone. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I don't give a damn if he is [glad to hear it] or not. This is something between Jesus and me. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Jeff says he enjoyed his physics course in high school, and got top grades, but "ever since I have had physics at the university I have had much trouble with it. This was a huge blow to me because I was used to doing well in school. I thought there was nothing I couldn't do if I just wanted it bad enough."

My reply will go like this: "You might want to read the picaresque novel The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. The epiphany at the end, as I recall, is that we shouldn't be seeking harrowing challenges, but rather tasks we find natural and interesting, tasks we were apparently born to perform. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

They appeared, as they had always appeared to Eliza and me, to be under some curse which required them to speak only of matters which did not interest them. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Life is no way to treat an animal. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

This is my first visit." "It's ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Phoebe Hurty hired me to write copy for ads about teen aged clothes. I had to wear the clothes I praised. That was part of the job. And I became friends with her two sons, who were my age. I was over at their house all the time.

She would talk bawdily to me and her sons, and our girlfriends when we brought them around. She was funny. She was liberating. She taught us to be impolite in conversation not only about sexual matters, but about American history and famous heroes, about the distribution of wealth, about school, about everything.

I now make my living being impolite. I am clumsy at it. I keep trying to imitate the impoliteness which was so graceful in Phoebe Hurty. I think now that grace was easier for her than it is for me because of the mood of the Great Depression. She believed what so many Americans believed then: that the nation would be happy and just and rational when prosperity came.

I never hear that word anymore: Prosperity. It used to be a synonym for Paradise. And Phoebe Hurty was able to believe that the impoliteness she recommended would give shape to an American paradise.

Now her sort of impoliteness is in fashion. But nobody believes anymore in a new American paradise. I sure miss Phoebe Hurty. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

That you admire pure hearts and heroes, that you love good and evil, and that you believe in romance. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The secret ingredient in my books is, there has never been a villain. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Hazel's obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The Englishmen were clean and enthusiastic and decent and strong. They sang boomingly well. They had been singing together every night for years. The Englishmen had also been lifting weights and chinning themselves for years. Their bellies were like washboards. The muscles of their calves and upper arms were like cannonballs. They were all masters of checkers and chess and bridge and cribbage and dominoes and anagrams and charades and Ping-Pong and billiards, as well. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Maybe I flatter myself when I think that I have things in common with Hamlet, that I have
an important mission, that I'm temporarily mixed up about how it should be done. Hamlet had one
big edge on me. His father's ghost told him exactly what he had to do, while I am operating
without instructions. But from somewhere something is trying to tell me where to go, what to do
there, and why to do it. Don't worry, I don't hear voices. But there is this feeling that I have a
destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life in New York. And I
roam.
And I roam. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

We can write morals into law, and enforce those morals harshly, or we can return to a true Free Enterprise System, which has the sink-or-swim justice of Caesar Augustus built into it. I emphatically favor the latter alternative. We must be hard, for we must become again a nation of swimmers, with the sinkers quietly disposing of themselves. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Another guy came in, and he said he was quitting his job at the Research Laboratory; said anything a scientist worked on was sure to wind up as a weapon, one way or another. Said he didn't want to help politicians with their fugging wars anymore. Name was Breed. I asked him if he was any relation to the boss of the fugging Research Laboratory. He said he fugging well was. Said he was the boss of the Research Laboratory's fugging son. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

A woman's not a woman till the pills wear off. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Western Civilization rests on great men, and nothing else. And we are no longer producing great men. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

job left vacant two weeks ago by death - the managership of the Pittsburgh Works. "How gay can a party get? ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

If you don't know what a funnel is, get Mommy to show you one. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

There had been no black people on the household staff of the McCone mansion in Cleveland, no black people in my schools. Not even when I was a communist had I had a black person for a friend. Near ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

was in fact, openly and proudly, a card-carrying communist until Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-nine. Hell and heaven, as I saw it, were making common cause against weakly defended peoples everywhere. After that I became a cautious believer in capitalistic democracy again. It ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The Americans' clothes were meanwhile passing through poison gas. Body lice and bacteria and fleas were dying by the billions. So it goes. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

For reasons obvious to us all, this galaxy is dissolved! ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Nobody else suspected that he was going crazy. Everybody else thought he looked fine and was acting fine. Now he was in the hospital. The doctors agreed; He was going crazy. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

My mother was addicted to being rich, to servants and unlimited charge accounts, to giving lavish dinner parties, to taking frequent first-class trips to Europe. So one might say she was tormented by withdrawal symptoms all through the Great Depression. She was acculturated! Acculturated persons are those who find that they are no longer treated as the sort of people they thought they were, because the outside world has changed. An economic misfortune or a new technology, or being conquered by another country or political faction, can do that to people quicker than you can say "Jack Robinson." As Trout wrote in his "An American Family Marooned on the Planet Pluto": "Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become ridiculous." He said in conversation at the 2001 clambake: "If I hadn't learned how to live without a culture and a society, acculturation would have broken my heart a thousand times." *** ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

It is a joke to me that this man should have presented himself as an ardent conservationist, since so many of the companies he served as a director or in which he was a major stockholder were notorious damagers of the water or the soil or the atmosphere. But it wasn't a joke to *MacIntosh, who had come into this world incapable of caring much about anything. So, in order to hide this deficiency, he had become a great actor, pretending even to himself that he cared passionately about all sorts of things. With ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The past is prologue! ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Billy Pilgrim tried hard to care. A ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

twenty in number, ranging in age from sixteen ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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 ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I had a certain amount of skill as a dramatist, and Dr. Goebbels wanted me to use it ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

IF YOU FIND YOUR LIFE tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass." At ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

portrayed, in the most glowing and impassioned hues, their virtue and magnanimity, the imperishable honor they acquired for themselves, and the great services ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

stationery of Magnum Opus, ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

To put it another way: No matter what a young person thinks he or she is really hot stuff at doing, he or she is sooner or later going to run into somebody in the same field who will cut him or her a new asshole, so to speak. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I am a human being, not a human doing. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Science is magic that works. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell. The ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I was thrilled, heartbroken, hilarious, insane. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

People aren't supposed to look back. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The first something to be implied by all the nothing was in fact two somethings, who were God and Satan. God was male. Satan was female. They implied each other, and hence were peers in the emerging power structure, which was itself nothing but an implication. Power was implied by weakness.
Satan [...] couldn't undo anything God had done. She could at least try to make existence for His little toys less painful. She could see what He couldn't: To be alive was to be either bored or scared stiff. So she filled an apple with all sorts of ideas that might at least relieve the boredom, such as rules for games with cards and dice, and how to fuck [...] Satan had a serpent give Eve the apple. Eve took a bite and handed it to Adam. He took a bite, and then they fucked."
[...]
"All Satan wanted to do was help, and she did in many cases. And her record for promoting nostrums with occasionally dreadful side effects is no worse than that of the most reputable pharmaceutical houses of the present day. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The women's liberation movement of today in America, in its most oceanic sense, is a wish by women to be liked for something other than their reproductive abilities, especially since the planet is harrowingly overpopulated. And the rejection of the Equal Rights Amendment by male state legislators is this clear statement by men, in my opinion: "We're sorry, girls, but your reproductive abilities are about all we can really like you for."

The truth. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, 'This is a fact I can do without. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

This was where babies came from. *** ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

On an average day, 324,000 new babies are born into the world every day. During that same day, 10,000 persons, on an average, will have starved to death or died from malnutrition.' So it goes. 'In addition, 123,000 persons will die for other reasons.' So it goes. 'This leaves a net gain of about 191,000 each day in the world. The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world's total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000.'
'I suppose they will all want dignity,' I said.
'I suppose,' said O'Hare. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The question is, rather, whether or not America is to enter a new and distressing phase of history where men no longer pursue happiness but buy it. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

There's no question about it. The arts are an extremely high-risk situation. People are willing to take these extraordinary chances to become writers, musicians or painters, and because of them we have a culture. If this ever stops, our culture will die, because most of our culture, in fact, has been created by people that got paid nothing for it-- People like Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent van Gogh or Mozart. So, yes, it's a very foolish thing to do, notoriously foolish, but it seems human to attempt it anyway. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Galapagos': Vonnegut Explores Big-Brain Theory
October 23, 1985, Elizabeth Mehren

The big trouble, in Kurt Vonnegut's view, is our big brains.

'Our brains are much too large,' Vonnegut said. 'We are much too busy. Our brains have proved to be terribly destructive.'

Big brains, Vonnegut said, invent nuclear weapons. Big brains terrify the planet into worrying about when those weapons will be used. Big brains are restless. Big brains demand constant amusement. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

They had found a can of white paint, and on the front doors of the cab Frank had painted white stars, and on the roof he had painted the letters of a granfalloon: U.S.A. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

And we built up between ourselves a pathetic sort of domesticity that we both felt need of. We began tasting our food again, making little discoveries in grocery stores, bringing them home to share. When strawberries came in season, I remember, Kraft and I whooped it up as though Jesus had returned. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

And Halyard suddenly realized that, just as religion and government had been split into disparate entities centuries before, now, thanks to the machines, politics and government lived side by side, but touched almost nowhere. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I agree that all religions, including Bokononism, are nothing but lies. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or a cloud, at a stone right in front of them, or even down into a canyon behind them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn't be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out.
That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today's war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

That's a fugging shame, ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn't see those causes at all, or even imagine them. One thing Trout said that Rosewater liked very much was that there really were vampires and werewolves and goblins and angels and so on, but that they were in the fourth dimension. So was William Blake, Rosewater's favorite poet, according to Trout. So were heaven and hell. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The number was: "2 B R 0 2 B. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Well done, Mr. Krebbs, well done. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Those beloved, frumpish books gave off a smell that permeated the ward - like flannel pajamas that hadn't been changed for a month, or like Irish stew. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

To me, wanting every habitable planet to be inhabited is like wanting everybody to have athlete's foot. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

While bachelors are lonely people, I'm convinced that married men are lonely people with dependents. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

His very first story, he told me as he was dying, was set in Camelot, the court of King Arthur in Britain: Merlin the Court Magician casts a spell that allows him to equip the Knights of the Round Table with Thompson submachine guns and drums of .45-caliber dumdums.
Sir Galahad, the purest in heart and mind, familiarizes himself with this new virtue-compelling appliance. While doing so, he puts a slug through the Holy Grail and makes a Swiss cheese of Queen Guinevere. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

In [The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain] proves to his own grim satisfaction, and to mine as well, that Satan and not God created the planet earth and "the damned human race." If you doubt that, read your morning paper. Never mind what paper. Never mind what date. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The pride in strength and important mystery showed no less in the eyes of the sweepers than in those of the machinists and inspectors, and in those of the foreman, who alone was without a lunchbox. A ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

And the lawyers! Of course, I say it's a pretty good thing what happened to them, because it was a bad thing for them, which couldn't help to be a good thing for everybody else. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

She had never seen me draw–because not drawing and forgetting everything I knew about art, I thought, was the magic key to my becoming a serious painter. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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 Jr.

History! Read it and weep! ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

148She once said, "Just because you have talent doesn't mean you have to you have to do something with it. ~ Nanette Vonnegut

If there is to be no ceiling on the amount of money a man can take out of our economy, then concomitantly there can be no foundation below which a human being cannot sink. What capitalists must realize is that you are fighting to make capitalism survive, not destroy it; you are fighting to eliminate the seeds of destruction inherent in the status quo."
~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr's letter to Don Matchan, 27 April 1947 ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

It was a hideous discovery for the stranger to make - that a man at the end of his days was capable of inflicting pain as the rawest, loudest youth. With so little time left, the stranger added one more item to his long, long list of regrets. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Back when childhoods were often so protracted, it is unsurprising that so many people got into the lifelong habit of believing, even after their parents were gone, that somebody was always watching over them - God or a saint or a guardian angel or the stars or whatever. People ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

For some reason, the less you pay for a watch, the surer you can be that it will never stop. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

You're not a bad sort, you know, " he said, "particularly when you forget who you are. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Oh, Mankind, rejoice in the apathy of our Creator, for it makes us free and truthful and dignified at last. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.