Top 500 Kurt Vonnegut Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

259. “I used my daughter’s crayons for each main character. One end of the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there was all that middle part, which was the middle.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

260. “Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

261. “You have never seen greatness in a Presidency; I have. It was a rich kid who you would think had every reason to be a horse’s ass – Franklin Roosevelt. He was humane and wise and resourceful. He was called a traitor to his class.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

262. “I consider writing an act of good citizenship.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

264. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

265. “In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

266. “The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

267. “The right of the people to peacefully assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievances is now worth a pitcher of warm spit. That’s because TV will not come and treat it respectfully. Television is really something.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

268. “Jokes have to be quite naked to be understood. They have to be quite simple.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

269. “He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

270. “Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

271. “I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

272. “Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

273. “One thing I hate about school committees today is that they cut arts programs out of the curriculum because they say the arts aren’t a way to make a living.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

274. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

275. “Is there nothing I have done which will outlive me, other than the opprobrium of my first wife and sons and grandchildren? Do I care? Doesn’t everybody? Poor me. Poor practically everybody, with so little durable good to leave behind!”

— Kurt Vonnegut

276. “Round and round we spin, with feet of lead and wings of tin.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

277. “Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

278. “Roses are red, And ready for plucking, You’re sixteen, And ready for high school.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

279. “We are America’s Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

280. “There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

281. “In the water I am beautiful.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

282. “It’s a terrible waste to be happy and not notice it.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

283. “It’s perfectly ordinary to be a socialist. It’s perfectly normal to be in favor of fire departments.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

284. “There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

285. “The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

286. “Bill Gates says, ‘Wait till you can see what your computer can become.’ But it’s you who should be doing the becoming. What you can become is the miracle you were born to work-not the damn fool computer.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

287. “Don’t put one foot in your job and the other in your dream, Ed. Go ahead and quit, or resign yourself to this life. It’s just too much of a temptation for fate to split you right up the middle before you’ve made up your mind which way to go.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

288. “I am better now. Word of honour: I am better now.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

289. “There’s only one me, and I’m stuck with him.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

290. “Having a yacht is a reason for being more cheerful than most.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

291. “I went to New York to be born again. And when the train plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with its lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

292. “Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don’t stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect. Live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy. Get somebody to teach you to play a musical instrument.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

293. “One thing I learned, with permission of the school committee of Indianapolis, was that when a tyrant or a government gets in trouble it wonders what to do. Declare war! Then nothing else matters. It’s like chess; when in doubt, castle.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

294. “Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

295. “It is time for me to be dead for a little while – and then live again.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

296. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

297. “Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

298. “My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

299. “A society is only as healthy as its ideas are humane.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut