Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

The riot, then, was an exercise in science and theology—a seeking after clues by the living as to what life was all about.

We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative. What could be simpler?

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

I hadn't aimed at anything. If I had thought of the bullet's hitting anything, I don't remember now. I was the great marksman, anyway. If I aimed at nothing, then nothing is what I would hit. The bullet was a symbol, and nobody was ever hurt by a symbol. It was a farewell to my childhood and a confirmation of my manhood. Why didn't I use a blank cartridge? What kind of a symbol would that have been?

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting...but no good reason to ever hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive....it's that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.

Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable.

What is literature but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called "thought".

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.

You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages — they haven't ended yet.

We could have saved [the Earth] but we were too damned cheap.

All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.