"the late twentieth century will go down in history, i'm sure, as an era of pharmaceutical buffoonery."
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Quote collection
Kurt Vonnegut quotes (page 35 of 49)
978 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
". . . but the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree."
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"I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. ‘This above all ...’"
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"I was taught in the sixth grade that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it. I got a very good grade."
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"I love cell phones. I see people so happy and proud, walking around. Gesturing, you know. I'm like Karl Marx, I'm up for anything that makes people happy."
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"What we will be seeking... for the rest of our lives will be large, stable communities of like-minded people, which is to say relatives. They no longer exist. The lack of them is not only the main cause, but probably the only cause of our shapeless discontent in the midst of such prosperity."
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"They say, you know, about evolution, it surely happened because their fossil record shows that. Look, my body and your body are miracles of design. Scientists are pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn't possibly have produced such machines."
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"We're not too young for love, just too young for about everything there is that goes with love."
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"Artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there."
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"Is there nothing I have done which will outlive me, other than the opprobrium of my first wife and sons and grandchildren? Do I care? Doesn't everybody? Poor me. Poor practically everybody, with so little durable good to leave behind!"
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"Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines."
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"The crowd, having been promised nothing, felt cheated, having received nothing."
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"The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage - and his children, and his cities, too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still - I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art."
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"It appeared to the Elders that the people here would believe anything about themselves, no matter how preposterous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings' heads that the whole Universe had been created by one big animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot of less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives of the Creator. The people down here just ate that up!"
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"I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares how we are or what we do."
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"Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies."
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"The Earthlings behaved at all times as though there were a big eye in the sky—as though that big eye were ravenous for entertainment."
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"A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap."
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"He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was."
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"Where men had once howled and hacked at one another, and fought nip-and-tuck with nature as well, the machines hummed and whirred and clicked, and made parts for baby carriages and bottle caps, motorcycles and refrigerators, television sets and tricycles-the fruits of peace."
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