"Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy."
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Quote collection
Kurt Vonnegut quotes (page 9 of 49)
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"People say there are no atheists in foxholes. A lot of people think this is a good argument against atheism. Personally, I think it's a much better argument against foxholes."
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"I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.""
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"The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful."
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"Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are."
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"Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules — and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress."
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"New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become."
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"He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next"
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"Anybody with any sense knows the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar by-and-by."
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"If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."
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"Don't be reckless with other peoples hearts. And don't put up with people that are reckless with yours."
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"Never trust a survivor until you know how they survived."
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"I'm eighty-three and I've been smoking since I was eleven. I'm suing the cigarette company because it promised to kill me and it hasn't."
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"I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable."
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"Ideas on earth were badges of friendship or enimity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enimity."
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"Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact how hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves."
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"They do not love one another because they do not love themselves."
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"I wanted all things to seem to make some sense, So we could all be happy, yes, instead of tense. And I made up lies, so they all fit nice, and I made this sad world a paradise"
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"People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God."
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"Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education. She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all."
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