Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

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

Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple years back by the wife of our President: "Just say no.

Life is no way to treat an animal.

Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God.

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

I couldn't survive my own pessimism if I didn't have some kind of sunny little dream.

There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers.

Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No. So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.

It pains me even now, even a million years later, to write about such human misbehaviour. A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That’s all I can say.

The complicated futility of ignorance.

To be is to do - Socrates To do is to be - Sartre Do Be Do Be Do - Sinatra

No one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

Any scientist who can't explain to an eight-year-old what he is doing is a charlatan.

The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.

See the cat? See the cradle?

The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.

There's only one me, and I'm stuck with him.

He was a graduate of West Point, which is military academy that turns young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.

Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe.

That’s the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind.

There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.

A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.

The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

Please — a little less love, and a little more common decency.

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

The highest treason in the USA is to say Americans are not loved, no matter where they are, no matter what they are doing there.

Music makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on.

I think, therefore I am, therefore I am photographable.

It's all like an ocean!" cried Dostoevski. I say it's all like cellophane.

Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?

Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.

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

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.

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.

The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.

What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain.

She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].

You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do.

The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.

There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.

Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.

The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren't and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why.

I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.

I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.

If facts weren't funny, or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.

I urge you to please notice when you are happy.