"Laughter or crying is what a human being does when there's nothing else he can do."
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Quote collection
Kurt Vonnegut quotes (page 26 of 49)
978 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart."
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"Make war not on terrorism but on ignorance, on sickness and on environmental degradation."
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"Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead."
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"Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the universe has been unknown to us so far. We serve as well as we can to the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community."
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"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."
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"The system promotes to the top those who don't care about the planet."
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"I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer."
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"And I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government."
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"What the Gospels actually said was: don't kill anyone until you are absolutely sure they aren't well connected."
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"Just in the nick of time they realized that it was their own habitat they were wrecking -- that they weren't merely visitors."
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"Aside from battles, the history of nations seemed to consist of nothing but powerless old poops like myself, heavily medicated and vaguely beloved in the long ago, coming to kiss the boots of young psychopaths."
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"Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth."
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"But I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was all the saints I met, who could be anywhere. By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society."
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"Freud said he didn't know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to."
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"They tell him that there is no why, since the moment simply is and since all of them are trapped in the moment, like bugs in amber."
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"... life, by definition, is never still."
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"Two radical ideas have been introduced into human thought. One of them is that energy and matter are pretty much the same sort of stuff. That's Einstein. The other is that revenge is a bad idea. Revenge is an enormously popular idea but, of course, Jesus came along with the radical idea of forgiveness. If you're insulted, you have to square accounts. So this invention by Jesus is as radical as Einstein's."
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"You develop a style from writing a lot."
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"There is this feeling that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life."
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