Top 500 Kurt Vonnegut Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “As stupid and vicious as men are, this is a lovely day.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

202. “I urge you to please notice when you are happy.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

203. “What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I’m told.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

204. “One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

212. “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

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

217. “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

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

221. “If I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I’m grateful that so many of those moments are nice.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

224. “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

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

227. “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

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

230. “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

231. “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

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

233. “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

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

250. “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