"All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies."
Read quote
9 likes
Quote collection
Kurt Vonnegut quotes (page 12 of 49)
978 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead."
Read quote
9 likes
"Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is."
Read quote
9 likes
"Rome wasn't built in a day."
Read quote
9 likes
"Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness."
Read quote
9 likes
"A society is only as healthy as its ideas are humane."
Read quote
8 likes
"If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do."
Read quote
8 likes
"If Jesus was alive today, we would kill him with lethal injection. I call that progress. We would have to kill him for the same reason he was killed the first time. His ideas are just too liberal."
Read quote
8 likes
"There was a message written in pencil on the tiles by the roller towel. This was it: What is the purpose of life? Trout plundered his pockets for a pen or pencil. He had an answer to the question. But he had nothing to write with, not even a burnt match. So he left the question unanswered, but here is what he would have written, if he had found anything to write with: To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool."
Read quote
8 likes
"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."
Read quote
8 likes
"I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did."
Read quote
8 likes
"Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we've got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that's why you ought to be glad you're an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they're doing."
Read quote
8 likes
"I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool."
Read quote
8 likes
"Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization."
Read quote
8 likes
"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."
Read quote
8 likes
"And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes."
Read quote
8 likes
"Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz."
Read quote
8 likes
"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."
Read quote
8 likes
"If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who."
Read quote
8 likes
"That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones."
Read quote
8 likes