Top 500 Kurt Vonnegut Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I’m told.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

202. “All people are insane. They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

203. “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

204. “Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

205. “You can’t just eat good food. You’ve got to talk about it too. And you’ve got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

206. “Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

207. “Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

208. “The world is full of people who are very clever at seeming much smarter than they really are.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

209. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

210. “It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

211. “My god-life! who can understand eve one little minute of it? ‘don’t try’ he said ’just pretend you understand.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

212. “Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

213. “To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

214. “All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

215. “The hopes and fears of all our years are here with us tonight.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

216. “Cigarettes are a classy way to commit suiside.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

217. “In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

218. “I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

219. “Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

220. “Make love when you can. It’s good for you.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

222. “Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

223. “I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

224. “We are what we imagine ourselves to be.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

225. “Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s really going on.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

226. “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?”

— Kurt Vonnegut

227. “Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn’t compete successfully with poets.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

229. “Human beings will be happier – not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

230. “The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

231. “What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too. And even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

232. “I beg you to believe the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or frustrateor of the grandest dreams of God Almighty.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

233. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

234. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

235. “Just because you can read, write and do a little math, doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to conquer the universe.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

236. “Hitler at the end thought that he himself was one more casualty in the war.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

237. “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

238. “All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

239. “Our government’s got a war on drugs. That’s certainly better then no drugs at all.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

240. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

241. “If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

242. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

243. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

244. “Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

245. “I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that’s not saying much.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

247. “They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

248. “If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

249. “There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

250. “What good is a planet called Earth, after all, if you own no land?”

— Kurt Vonnegut