Kurt Vonnegut Quotes and Quotation

Mother Night (1961)

• There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side.

• We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
  • Sometimes misquoted as: Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.

• Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutly vile.

• "You hate America, don't you?" she said.
  "That would be as silly as loving it," I said. "It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to the human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will."

• "That was the strength of the Nazis," she said. "They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make him stay away."

Cat's Cradle (1963)

God Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1965)

• I love you sons of bitches. You’re all I read any more. You're the only ones who’ll talk all about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstanding, mistakes, accidents, catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.
  • Eliot Rosewater to a group of science fiction writers.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

• This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.

• So it goes.
  • (Recurring statement throughout the novel.)

• I held up my right hand and I made her a promise 'Mary,' I said, 'I don't think this book is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.
  'I tell you what,' I said, 'I'll call it The Children's Crusade.
  She was my friend after that.

• Listen:
  Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

• The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

• The British had no way of knowing it, but the candles and the soap were made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the State.

• You know we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock "My God, my God—" I said to myself. "It's the Children's Crusade."

• The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
  But the Gospels actually taught this:
  Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.

• An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, 'There they go, there they go.'   He meant his brains.
  That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.

• Billy was having an adventure very common among people without power in time of war: He was trying to prove to a wilfully deaf and blind enemy that he was interesting to hear and see. He kept silent until the lights went out at night, and then, when there had been a long silence containing nothing to echo, he said to Rumfoord, "I was in Dresden when it was bombed. I was a prisoner of war."

Breakfast of Champions (1973)

• I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
  It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
  Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
  So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
  What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
  And all music is.

• Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.

• Let us devote to unselfishness the frenzy we once gave gold and underpants.

• Roses are red and ready for plucking
  You're sixteen and ready for high school.

• To be
  the eyes
  and ears
  and conscience
  of the Creator of the Universe,
  you fool.
  • Kilgore Trout's unwritten reply to the question "What is the purpose of life?"

Wampeters, Foma and Granfallons (1974)

• The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.
  • "In a Manner that Must Shame God Himself"

• I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled “Science Fiction” ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

• About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

• Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.
  • "When I Was Twenty-One"

• The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage— and his children, and his cities, too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still— I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art.

• A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who find those lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness. Science has nothing to do with it, friends.

Slapstick, or Lonesome No More (1976)

• I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, "Please— a little less love, and a little more common decency."

• Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.

Jailbird (1979)

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

• What is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?

Bluebeard (1987)

• Belief is nearly the whole of the Universe, whether based on truth or not.

• What is literature but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'.

• 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?

• I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

Hocus Pocus (1990)

• I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.

• The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, "There's a Chaplain who never visited the front."

Cold Turkey (2004)