Explore Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read 'Democracy in America' by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.

If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.

I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milky Way - with a century of transportation whoopee.

I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours.

Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.

We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

You are reading a bold and universal headline which says ,’I am here, I am here, I am here.

I said I wasn't interested, and she was bright enough to say that she wasn't really interested either. As things turned out, we both overestimated our apathies, but not that much.

Our government's got a war on drugs. That's certainly better than no drugs at all.

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine.

I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did.

I'm a painter in my dreams, you know.

Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.

I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer." "What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?