Kurt Vonnegut

“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.”

“Live while you live, when you're dead you're dead.”

“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'.”

“Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.”

“No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”

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

“A lot of people were opposed to it. A lot of people were for it. I myself think about it as little as possible.”

“Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.”

“Rabo Karabekian: I'm in the middle of a sentence.Circe Berman: Who isn't?.”

“Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.”

“Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.”

“Drawn crudely in the dust of three window-panes were a swastika, a hammer and sickle, and the Stars and Stripes. I had drawn the three symbols weeks before, at the conclusion of an argument about patriotism with Kraft. I had given a hearty cheer for each symbol, demonstrating to Kraft the meaning of patriotism to, respectively, a Nazi, a Communist, and an American. "Hooray, hooray, hooray," I'd said.”

“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. I tried to write one once. It was called Welcome to Earth. But I got stuck on explaining why we don't fall off the planet. Gravity is just a word. It doesn't explain anything. If I could get past gravity, I'd tell them how we reproduce, how long we've been here, apparently, and a little bit about evolution. I didn't learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It's also a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it.”

“Round and round we spin, with feet of lead and wings of tin.”

“You're the man who stands on the street corner with a roll of toilet paper, and written on each square are the words, 'I love you.' And each passer-by, no matter who, gets a square all his or her own. I don't want my square of toilet paper.'I didn't realize it was toilet paper.”

“It was not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do without love.It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him.What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity.Now even that had flickered out.How long I stood frozen there, I cannot say. If I was ever going to move again, someone else was going to have to furnish the reason for moving.Somebody did.A policeman watched me for a while, and then he came over to me, and he said, "You alright?"Yes," I said.You've been standing here a long time," he said.I know," I said.You waiting for somebody?" he said.No," I said.Better move on, don't you think?" he said.Yes, sir," I said.And I moved on.”

“We'd been apart so long--I'd been dead so long," she said in English. "I thought surely you'd built a new life, with no room in it for me. I'd hoped that.""My life is nothing but room for you." I said. "It could never be filled by anyone but you.”

“This woman was so ugly and stupid, she probably never should have been born. And yet Wait was the second person to have married her.”

“Fathers are always so proud the first time they see their sons in uniform," she said."I know Big John Karpinski was," I said. He is my neighbor to the north, of course. Big John's son Little John did badly in high school, and the police caught him selling dope. So he joined the Army while the Vietnam War was going on. And the first time he came home in uniform, I never saw Big John so happy, because it looked to him as though Little John was all straightened out and would amount to something.But then Little John came home in a body bag.”

“kar.a.bek.i.an (n.); (from Rabo Karabekian, U.S. 20th Cent. painter). Fiasco in which a person causes total destruction of own work and reputation through stupidity, carelessness or both.”

“Because of the movies nobody will believe that it was babies who fought the war.”

“Everything about life is a joke. Don't you know that?”

“The Contessa was surely way ahead of her time, too, in believing that men were not only usless and idiotic, but downright dangerous. That idea wouldn't catch on big in her native country until the last three years of the Vietnam War.”

“Women are so useless and unimaginative, aren't they? All they ever think of planting in the dirt is the seed of something beautiful or edible. The only missile they can ever think of throwing at anybody is a ball or a bridal bouquet.”

“All right - I'll tell you what you did for me: you went for happy, silly, beautiful walks with me.”

“Terry Kitchen asked me one time why, since I had so few gifts as a husband and father, I had gotten married. And I heard myself say: "That's the way the post-war movie goes.”

“You have to go, but I have to stay.”

“As Marilee and I were dressing, I whispered to her that I loved her with all my heart. What else was there to say?'You don't. You can't,' she said.”

“Is there nothing I have done which will outlive me, other than the opprobrium of my first wife and sons and grandchildren?Do I care?Doesn't everybody?Poor me. Poor practically everybody, with so little durable good to leave behind!”

“I like to think we were man and wife. Life itself can be sacramental. The supposition was that we would be leaving the Garden of Eden together, and would cleave to one another in the wilderness through thick and think.”

“I have had all I can stand of not taking myself seriously.”

“An idea has just come to me from nowhere, to wit: Might not the ancient and nearly universal belief that sperm could be metabolized into noble actions have been the inspiration for Einsten's very similar formula: 'E equals MC squared'?”

“I remember still how full of bad magic all those spearpoints to be put on the ends of rifles seemed to be. One was like a sharpened curtain rod. Another was triangular in cross-section, so that the wound it made wouldn't close up again and keep the blood and guts from falling out. Another one had sawteeth - so it could work its way through bone, I guess. I can remember thinking that war was so horrible that, at last, thank goodness, nobody could ever be fooled by romantic pictures and fiction and history into marching to war again.Nowadays, of course, you can buy a machine gun with a plastic bayonet for your little kid at the nearest toy boutique.”

“The Great Depression was going on, so that the station and the streets teemed with homeless people, just as they do today. The newspapers were full of stories of worker layoffs and farm foreclosures and bank failures, just as they are today. All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War.”

“Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.”

“There are too many of us and we are all too far apart.”

“And what gift of America to the rest of the world is actually most appreciated by the rest of the world? It is African American jazz and its offshoots. What is my definition of jazz? "Safe sex of the highest order.”

“How subservient to Jesus, or to a humane God Almighty, were the leaders of this country back in the 1840's, when Marx said such a supposedly evil thing about religion? They had made it perfectly legal to own human slaves, and weren't going to led women vote or hold public office, God forbid, for another eighty year.”

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

“The complicated futility of ignorance.”

“In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appalling powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed.In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazi's once were.And with good reason.In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound 'em and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all we want.Piece of cake.In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.Piece of cake.The O'Reilly Factor.So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago paper called "In These Times."Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic "New York Times" guaranteed there were weapons of destruction there.Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn't even seen the First World War. 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.Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people too. I am a veteran of the Second World War and I have to say this is the not the first time I surrendered to a pitiless war machine.My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?”

“The biggest truth to face now – what is probably making me unfunny now for the remainder of my life – is that I don't think people give a damn whether the planet goes or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.”

“Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”

“Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.”

“A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.”

“Much of the conversation in the country consisted of lines from television shows, both past and present.”

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

“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don't really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”

“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.”

“The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they didn't use them for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get. So, in the interest of survival they trained themselves to be agreeing machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking and then they thought it too.”