"It's perfectly ordinary to be a socialist. It's perfectly normal to be in favor of fire departments."
Read quote
5 likes
Quote collection
Kurt Vonnegut quotes (page 23 of 49)
978 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases."
Read quote
5 likes
"Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time."
Read quote
5 likes
"Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer."
Read quote
5 likes
"If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?"
Read quote
5 likes
"Well, there was stuff going on, heroic events. One was what used to be, and probably still is, the largest moving project in history. The headquarters of the Bell Telephone Company used to be brick. What they did was take the old brick building - with the operators in there saying, "Number please" and all that - and they put it through a quarter of a turn and moved it half a block!"
Read quote
5 likes
"Beware of "grandfalloons" and "foma". A "grandfalloon" is a proud and meaningless association of human beings. "Foma" are harmless truths intended to comfort simple souls."
Read quote
5 likes
"I was raised by a black maid by the name of Ida Young and I probably talked to her more than anybody, so whatever is nutty about me was nutty about her, too, I think because I saw a lot more of her than I did of my parents."
Read quote
5 likes
"I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are."
Read quote
5 likes
"Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galapagos Islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next--and on and on."
Read quote
5 likes
"The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: "Nothing."
Read quote
5 likes
"The youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation."
Read quote
5 likes
"Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don't stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect. Live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy. Get somebody to teach you to play a musical instrument."
Read quote
5 likes
"If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is."
Read quote
5 likes
"You know — we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. "'My God, my God — ' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade."
Read quote
5 likes
"All people are insane. They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons."
Read quote
5 likes
"What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity."
Read quote
5 likes
"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."
Read quote
5 likes
"Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn."
Read quote
5 likes
"Einstein's E=mc2 is an extraordinary concept. So radical: matter and energy are two phases of the same sort of general stuff. There's only one other idea that radical: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."
Read quote
5 likes