Top 500 Kurt Vonnegut Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday’s snow job becomes today’s sermon.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

402. “I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

404. “Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

405. “Some automatic device clicked in her big brain, and her knees felt weak, and there was a chilly feeling in her stomach. She was in love with this man. They don’t make memories like that anymore.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

406. “Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

407. “I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

408. “She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

409. “Hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

410. “I can have oodles of charm when I want to.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

411. “I’ve been living alone for so long, everything about me’s private. I’m surprised anyone’s able to understand a word I say.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

412. “I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

413. “Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

414. “Or they’ll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

415. “Dwayne’s bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

416. “I pity the Jews trying to get through life with only half a Bible. That’s like trying to get from here to San Francisco with a road map that stops at Dubuque, Iowa.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

417. “The insane, on occasion, are not without their charms.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

418. “I’ve often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they’re on, why they don’t fall off it, how much time they’ve probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

419. “All the new technology seems redundant to me. I was quite happy with the United States mail service. And, I don’t even have an answering machine, for God’s sake.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

420. “I’m mad about being old and I’m mad about being American. Apart from that, OK.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

421. “It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

422. “The umpire had comical news. The congregation had been theoretically spotted from the air by a theoretical enemy. They were all theoretically dead now. The theoretical corpses laughed and ate a hearty noontime meal.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

423. “Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

424. “Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

425. “He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

426. “Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

427. “He ate a pear. It was a hard one. It fought back against his grinding teeth. It snapped in juicy protest.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

428. “If I am ever put to death on the hook, expect a very human performance.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

429. “The most heartbreakingly beautiful girl I ever hope to see.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

430. “A story has to be a good date, because the reader can stop at any time. Remember, readers are selfish and have no compulsion to be decent about anything.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

431. “Vonnegut could not help looking back, despite the danger of being turned metaphorically into a pillar of salt, into am emblem of the death that comes to those who cannot let go of the past.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

432. “And I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

433. “My God, the religious right will not acknowledge what a merciful person Jesus was.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

434. “There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

435. “Children get smashed for hours on some strictly limited aspect of the Great Big Everything, the Universe, such as water or snow or mud or colors or rocks.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

436. “Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

437. “There is a riddle about a man who is locked in a room with nothing but a bed and a calendar, and the question is: How does he survive? The answer is: He eats dates from the calendar and drinks from the springs of the bed.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

438. “The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world’s total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000. I suppose they will all want dignity, I said.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

439. “I love cell phones. I see people so happy and proud, walking around. Gesturing, you know. I’m like Karl Marx, I’m up for anything that makes people happy.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

440. “It is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln. He always steals the show.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

441. “I could go on to speak of sanity as compared with insanity, decency as compared with vandalism, friendship as compared with rabies.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

442. “Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

443. “The computer revolution has allowed white-collar criminals to do what the Mob would have loved to do – put a pawnshop and a loan shark in every home!”

— Kurt Vonnegut

444. “Sons of suicides seldom do well.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

445. “Thanks to their decreased brainpower, people aren’t diverted from the main business of life by the hobgoblins of opinion anymore.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

446. “It is always pitiful when any human being falls into a condition hardly more respectable than that of an animal. How much more pitiful it is when the person who falls has had all the advantages!”

— Kurt Vonnegut

447. “What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish that people wouldn’t get so mad at them.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

448. “He had the air of a spy in a melodrama, missing nothing, liking nothing, looking forward to the great day when everything would be turned upside down.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

449. “This person has just arrived on this planet, knows nothing about it, has no standards by which to judge it. This person does not care what it becomes. It is eager to become absolutely anything it is supposed to be.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

450. “Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.”

— Kurt Vonnegut