Top 500 Kurt Vonnegut Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

303. “Evolution is so creative. That’s how we got giraffes.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

304. “What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!”

— Kurt Vonnegut

305. “Laughter or crying is what a human being does when there’s nothing else he can do.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

306. “The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

307. “I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

308. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

309. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

311. “Ideas on earth were badges of friendship or enimity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enimity.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

312. “What’s the point of being alive,” she said, “if you’re not going to communicate?”

— Kurt Vonnegut

313. “She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

314. “Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

315. “Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

316. “The Earthlings behaved at all times as though there were a big eye in the sky – as though that big eye were ravenous for entertainment.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

317. “Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?”

— Kurt Vonnegut

318. “The chief weapon of sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was too late, how heartless and greedy they were.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

319. “The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. You are afraid of pain now, Unk, but you won’t learn anything if you don’t invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

320. “The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

321. “Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

322. “Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

323. “I’d rather have written “Cheers” than anything I’ve written.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

324. “I apologize because of the terrible mess the planet is in. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any ‘Good Old Days,’ there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, ‘Don’t look at me. I just got here myself.’”

— Kurt Vonnegut

325. “I was clasified as a ‘Science Fiction’ writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

326. “During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

327. “I had a friend who was a heavy drinker. If somebody asked him if he’d been drunk the night before, he would always answer offhandedly, ‘Oh, I imagine.’ I’ve always liked that answer. It acknowledges life as a dream.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

328. “George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

329. “Beer, of course, is actually a depressant, but poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

330. “That’s what is was to be young – to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

331. “A saint is a person who behaves decently in a shockingly indecent society.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

332. “People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

333. “The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn’t want to be used by anybody.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

334. “Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

335. “I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

336. “Words may deeply wound us, but we must run that risk to be free.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

337. “A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

338. “I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

339. “Belief is nearly the whole of the universe whether based on truth or not.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

340. “Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

341. “Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

342. “She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

343. “Well here you are, there it is, THIS is what it’s all about.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

344. “You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

345. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

346. “Praise or damn as you please, but do so rather flatly, pragmatically, with cunning attention to annoying or gratifying details. Be yourself. Be unique. Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

347. “One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

348. “There was a time when I could vote for economic justice, and I can’t anymore.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

349. “I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

350. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut