Quotes by kurt vonnegut

“The troops and their ladies had first drunk champagne. There were also remains of sandwiches, and I stepped on one, which I think was either cucumber or watercress. I scraped it off on the curbing,...”

“If you go back through history, you’ll find that the people who have been most eager to rule, to make the laws, to enforce the laws and to tell everybody exactly how God Almighty wants things here ...”

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

“Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.”

“I am committing suicide by cigarette,” I replied. She thought that was reasonably funny. I didn’t. I thought it was hideous that I should scorn life that much, sucking away on cancer sticks.”

“It pains me even now, even a million years later, to write about such human misbehaviour.A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That’s all I can say.”

“Christ, back in Chicago, we don’t make bicycles any more. It’s allhuman relations now. The eggheads sit around trying to figure out newways for everybody to be happy. Nobody can get fired, no matte...”

“Mary Hepburn was meanwhile murdering herself up in her room, lying on her bed with the polyethylene sheath of her "Jackie dress" swapped around her head. The sheath was now all steamed up inside, a...”

“I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to hap...”

“Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple years back by the wife of our President: "Just say no.”

“The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be ...”

“Nothing ever really ends. That’s the horrible part of being in the short-story business—you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. ‘Millicent at last understands.’ Nobody ever...”

“Maybe I did hurt him, but I don’t think I could have hurt him much. He was one of the best-protected human beings who ever lives. People couldn’t get at him because he just wasn’t interested in peo...”

“It’s all I’ve seen, all I’ve been through,” I said, “that makes it damn nearly impossible for me to say anything. I’ve lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and ...”

“...we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole rui...”

“Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth.”“You don’t seem to agree.”“I don’t know whether I agree or not. I just have trouble understandinghow truth, all by itself, co...”

“You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too. And you've got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.”

“My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.”

“To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That’s all right. I like to have my heart broken.”

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”