100 Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, an American novelist and satirist, left an indelible mark on literature with his unique blend of dark humor, social commentary, and insightful storytelling. Through works like "Slaughterhouse-Five," he challenged conventional narrative structures, using science fiction elements to explore the horrors of war and the nature of time. Vonnegut's writing often tackled profound themes with a touch of irony, inviting readers to confront complex issues in an approachable and thought-provoking manner. His ability to blend humor with incisive critique made him a beloved and influential figure among readers and fellow writers alike. Beyond his literary contributions, Vonnegut's personal experiences as a World War II veteran and his observations of post-war society informed his work, contributing to his unique perspective on the human condition and the absurdities of modern life.
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies. (Meaning)
Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand. (Meaning)
Everything is nothing, with a twist. (Meaning)
I urge you to please notice when you are happy. (Meaning)
Science is magic that works. (Meaning)
Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. (Meaning)
A sane person to an insane society must appear insane (Meaning)
Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. (Meaning)
You are better than you think. (Meaning)
If you want to break the rules of grammar, first learn the rules of grammar. (Meaning)
We are what we imagine ourselves to be. (Meaning)
All this happened, more or less. (Meaning)
When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth. (Meaning)
Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been. (Meaning)
Love may fail, but # courtesy will prevail. (Meaning)
Please — a little less love, and a little more common decency. (Meaning)
If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable. (Meaning)
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. (Meaning)
We could have saved the earth, but we were too damned cheap. (Meaning)
We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane. (Meaning)
Life is no way to treat an animal. (Meaning)
How embarrassing to be human. (Meaning)
All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental. (Meaning)
Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones. (Meaning)
No good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary. (Meaning)
No moral value is greater than humanity. (Meaning)
The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest. (Meaning)
We are what we pretend to be. (Meaning)
Farewell, hello, farewell, hello. (Meaning)
The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal. (Meaning)
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. (Meaning)
The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. (Meaning)
It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love. (Meaning)
Love is where you find it. (Meaning)
in nonsense is strength (Meaning)
We're here on Earth to fart around (Meaning)
Be fruitful, and multiply. (Meaning)
Round and round we spin, with feet of lead and wings of tin. (Meaning)
She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. (Meaning)
Nice, nice, very nice. (Meaning)
There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. (Meaning)
God damn it, you've got to be kind. (Meaning)
Never index your own book. (Meaning)
If you can do no good, at least do no harm. (Meaning)
If this isn't nice, I don't know what is. (Meaning)
An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. (Meaning)
Rome wasn't built in a day. (Meaning)
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
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.
I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.
We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - "God damn it, you've got to be kind."
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.
Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.
Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.
During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in - and which we lost - every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.
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.
We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.
I don't know what's going on, and I'm probably not smart enough to understand if somebody was to explain it to me. All I know is we're being tested somehow, by somebody or some thing a whole lot smarter than us, and all I can do is be friendly and keep calm and try and have a nice time till it's over.
Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. 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.
There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.
It's a terrible waste to be happy and not notice it.
A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.
I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
Everything is nothing, with a twist.
Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.
A first grader should understand that her or his 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, attractive. It's a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it.
Because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs. So people pretend there is drama where there is none.
Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.
Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?
Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.
Nietzsche had a little one-liner on how to choose a wife. He said, ''Are you willing to have a conversation with this woman for the next forty years?'' That's how to pick a wife.
Science is magic that works.
Smoking is the only honorable form of suicide.
I still catch myself feeling sad about things that don’t matter anymore.
Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference.
About belief or lack of belief in an afterlife: Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort. I am a humanist, which mean, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead.
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow - whether there is a market for it or not! The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don't show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward.
Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.
This is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate.
You don't do art for any other reason than to help your soul grow.
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
And 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.
Hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide.
All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States - and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!
If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow.
Your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.
Even as I speak, the very last polar bear may be dying of hunger on account of climate change, on account of us. And I sure miss the polar bears. Their babies are so warm and cuddly and trusting, just like ours.
Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?
So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.
The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.
Unannounced changes in life's itinerary are like dancing lessons from God.
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
Being an American means never having to say you're sorry.
The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. "Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?" she asked me. "The big show is inside my head," I said.
And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.
Well here you are, there it is, THIS is what it's all about.
Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.
The secret to success in any human endeavor is total concentration.
Laughing is good exercise. It's like jogging on the inside.
Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.
Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.
A saint is a person who behaves decently in a shockingly indecent society.
A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.
Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.
A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.
Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.
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.
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.
You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages--they haven't ended yet.
As stupid and vicious as men are, this is a lovely day.
People say there are no atheists in foxholes. A lot of people think this is a good argument against atheism. Personally, I think it's a much better argument against foxholes.
I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable.
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."
The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.
Human beings are about 1,000 times dumber and meaner than they think they are.
Never trust a survivor until you know how they survived.
Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.
I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.
My country is in ruins. So I'm a fish in a poisoned fishbowl. I'm mostly just heartsick about this. There should have been hope. This should have been a great country. But we are despised all over the world now. I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That's why I served in World War II, and that's why I wrote books.
I'm eighty-three and I've been smoking since I was eleven. I'm suing the cigarette company because it promised to kill me and it hasn't.
There are too many of us and we are all too far apart.
You are better than you think.
Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness.
If you want to break the rules of grammar, first learn the rules of grammar.
The world is full of people who are very clever at seeming much smarter than they really are.
If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.
To be is to do - Socrates To do is to be - Sartre Do Be Do Be Do - Sinatra
If Jesus was alive today, we would kill him with lethal injection. I call that progress. We would have to kill him for the same reason he was killed the first time. His ideas are just too liberal.
How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?....The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.
Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.
A society is only as healthy as its ideas are humane.
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.
The truth is, we know so little about life, we don't really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.
I couldn't survive my own pessimism if I didn't have some kind of sunny little dream.
The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.
If people insist on living as if there's no tomorrow, there really won't be one.
Future generations will look back on TV as the lead in the water pipes that slowly drove the Romans mad.
I urge you to please notice when you are happy.
There is no good reason good can't triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the mafia.
The most racist, nastiest act by the USA, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki. Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away men, women, and children.
Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.
Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable.
Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.
In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in his cosmic loneliness. And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat, looked around, and spoke. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely. "Everything must have a purpose?" asked God. "Certainly," said man. "Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God. And He went away.
One good thing about TV is, if you die violently, God forbid, on camera, you will not have died in vain because you will be great entertainment.
The two prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.
Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.
Words may deeply wound us, but we must run that risk to be free.
The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: "Nothing.
Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.
Any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.
I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.
Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals.
What passes for culture in my head is really a bunch of commercials.
Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but the living room in your fortified compound.
The reason we write fiction is because it's so much easier to exist spending part of each day in an imaginary world.
there i was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic tv, with virtually no health services for the poor. where to go? what to do?
I'd like to teach Iraq about Democracy because we're so experienced with it. First they should know that after 100 years they should free their slaves. Then after 150 years they should give their women the right to vote. Oh, and of course when they start it all they should begin with some genocide and ethnic cleansing.
It distresses me deeply that ideas are not to be circulated freely in the USA if certain persons have their way. One of the things that was great about this country was that I could say anything and that everyone else could say anything and we would compare all possible ideas and arrive at opinions.
The system promotes to the top those who don't care about the planet.
The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.
I just know that there are plenty of people who are in terrible trouble and can't get out. And so I'm impatient with those who think that it's easy for people to get out of trouble.
I now believe that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue their planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imagination.
You can't fight progress. The best you can do is ignore it, until it finally takes your livelihood and self-respect away.
... life, by definition, is never still.
His mother understood my illness immediately, that it was my world rather than myself that was diseased.
The biggest truth to face now - what is probably making me unfunny now for the remainder of my life - is that I don't think people give a damn whether the planet goes or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.
The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks. This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?
People are only animals, but special animals. Every animal has fought and killed to survive, even before the dinosaurs. We're the only ones that do it for fun. That's why I don't know about Darwinism. Supposedly evolution and natural selection are all about survival, but we haven't gotten smarter over the years, only more dangerous.
My God, the religious right will not acknowledge what a merciful person Jesus was.
Much of the blame is the malarkey that artists have created to glorify war, which as we all know, is nonsense, and a good deal worse than that — romantic pictures of battle, and of the dead and men in uniform and all that. And I did not want to have that story told again.
Do I resent rich people? No. The best or worst I can do is notice them. I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money.
You are being suffocated by tradition... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art ---it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants.
People are lying all the time as to what a murderous nation we are. So let it be known. We're behaving abominably. It's like having a relative go absolutely nuts. Somebody has to say, "I think Uncle Charlie's off his rocker." We are behaving in a bizarre manner.
How embarrassing it is to be human.
It's an astonishing skill that people can read, and read well. Very few people can read well. For instance, I have to be very careful with irony, saying something while meaning the exact opposite.
― Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
