Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

“Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism; Iraq in cynical money-making. And theres no optimism or idealism now -- Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. Were proud of being ignorant; that leaves virtue at our core. We arent frazzled by knowledge like foreigners, so we can be trusted.”

“One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.”

When I used to come home from school Mother used to ask me what happened that day, and I’d tell her,” said Miss Pefko. “Now I come home from work and she asks me the same question, and all I can say is—” Miss Pefko shook her head and let her crimson lips flap slackly— “I dunno, I dunno, I dunno.”“If there’s something you don’t understand,” urged Dr. Breed, “ask Dr. Horvath to explain it. He’s very good at explaining.” He turned to me. “Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn’t explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.”“Then I’m dumber than an eight-year-old,” Miss Pefko mourned. “I don’t even know what a charlatan is.

The secret to success in any human endeavor is total concentration.

Id rather have written Cheers than anything Ive written.

We are what we pretend to be so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch: everything stops.

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasnt even nothing or once.

Science is magic that works.

I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.

As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs.

I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.

I was a chemistry major, but Im always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so Ive brought scientific thinking to literature. Theres been very little gratitude for this.

This country is being managed to death, being public related to death.

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasnt always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

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.