Kurt Vonnegut quotes - page 17

No one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins. (Kurt Vonnegut)
As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
If somebody says, ''I love you,'' to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires ''I love you, too. '' View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
There was no immunity to cuckoo ideas on Earth. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
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. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn't see those causes at all, or even imagine them. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
And we all vied, in saving face, to be the greatest student of human nature, the person with the quickest sense of humor. (Kurt Vonnegut)
There is one other book,. that can teach you everything you need to know about life...it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I'm a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
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. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific. No scientist worthy of the name could say such a thing. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
Thinking doesn't seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism Iraq in cynical money-making. And there's no optimism or idealism now -- Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. We're proud of being ignorant that leaves virtue at our core. We aren't frazzled by knowledge like foreigners, so we can be trusted. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
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. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. (Kurt Vonnegut)
The city was blacked out because bombers might come, so Billy didn't get to see Dresden do one of the most cheerful things a city can do when the sun goes down, which is to wink its lights on one by one. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
It posed the question posed by all such stone piles.: how had puny men moved stones so big? And, like all such stone piles, it answered the question itself. Dumb terror had moved those stones so big. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
There was a still life on Billy's bedside table-two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes. Air was trying to get out of the dead water. Bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut