The Best Kurt Vonnegut Quotes and Quotations

Here are some of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut quotes. (Yeah, there are
a lot of them. I like Kurt Vonnegut and find him completely quotable.)

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school
class is running the country.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so
far, but I think it’s a very poor scheme for survival.

People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream
about God.

Best Kurt Vonnegut Quotes and Quotations

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes from Slaughterhouse Five

So it goes.

How nice–to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

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

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 Quotes from Cat’s Cradle

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.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless
laughter can be said to remedy anything.

Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.

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.

She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God
is doing.

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes from A Man Without a Country

Humor is an almost physiological response to fear.

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.”

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.

I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly
as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes from Breakfast of Champions

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.

The chief weapon of sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish.
Nobody else could believe, until it was too late, how heartless and greedy
they were.

Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person
immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

I can have oodles of charm when I want to.

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

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes from Cold Turkey

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 don’t know
what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a
state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to
be kind.

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes from Slapstick

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.

Why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you
take a flying fuck at the mooooooon?

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes from Deadeye Dick

That is my principal objection to life, I think: It’s too easy, when
alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes from Hocus Pocus

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and
nobody wants to do maintenance.

During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words
by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that
he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making
the Supreme Sacrifice.

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes from Mother Night

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

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to
hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with
you, too.

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes from Sirens of Titan

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love
whoever is around to be loved.

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes from Timequake

All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.

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.”

More Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

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

Well, the telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from
some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because
they are in some way truthful.

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled “science
fiction” ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many
serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that
doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.

Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

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.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of
ours.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody
tell you different.

If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an
enemy.

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.

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn’t
really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is:
he wasn’t going to compose Beethoven’s Fifth.

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.

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?

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.

I want to stay 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.

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

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I
myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just
persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I
consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!

This post was originally published, in a somewhat different form, on Funny Quotes about Life, in 2009.

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