"A lack of seriousness has led to all sorts of wonderful insights."
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Quote collection
Kurt Vonnegut quotes (page 19 of 49)
978 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind."
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"The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again. There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling I had to believe whatever clocks said -and calendars."
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"It is time for me to be dead for a little while - and then live again."
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"For a Russian to be chivalrous with an American is a spiritual impossibility, a conradiction in terms."
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"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.""
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"Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes."
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"Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead."
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""Self-taught, are you?" Julian Castle asked Newt. "Isn't everybody?" Newt inquired. "Very good answer." Castle was respectful."
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"Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?"
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"I urge you to please notice when you are happy."
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"There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore."
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"What's the point of being alive," she said, "if you're not going to communicate?"
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"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."
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"Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism Iraq in cynical money-making. And there's no optimism or idealism now -- Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. We're proud of being ignorant that leaves virtue at our core. We aren't frazzled by knowledge like foreigners, so we can be trusted."
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"If I am ever put to death on the hook, expect a very human performance."
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"There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."
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"Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions."
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"Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different."
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"Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones."
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