Kurt Vonnegut
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.Collection: Women
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.Collection: War
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.Collection: Society
As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs.Collection: Science
We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.Collection: Environmental
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.Collection: Government
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.Collection: Life
There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.Collection: Hope
All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment.Collection: Science
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.Collection: Knowledge
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.Collection: Age
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.Collection: Freedom
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.Collection: Beauty
I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It's as though I had taken over the family Esso station.Collection: Family
My cash cows, the slick magazines, were put out of business by TV.Collection: Business
I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.Collection: War
Science is magic that works.Collection: Science
All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.Collection: Change
This country is being managed to death, being public related to death.Collection: Death
If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.Collection: Nature
I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.Collection: Teacher
The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.Collection: Equality
I'm screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I'm funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that's appreciated by young people.Collection: Funny
There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.Collection: Love
Actually, to be an effective person politically in this country, I think you have to be thirty or over, and also you have to be rich, well-placed, you have to be close to power. And I don't think that young people, because they look young, can do much, as I think they are counterproductive.Collection: Power
About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.Collection: Best
I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.Collection: Business
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?Collection: Freedom
When I'm being funny, I try not to offend. I don't think much of what I've done has been in really ghastly taste. I don't think I have embarrassed many people or distressed them.Collection: Funny
Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.Collection: Science
Oh, sure, we have another world war coming, and another great depression, but where are the leaders this time?Collection: Time
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.Collection: Morning
I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see.Collection: Hope
Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.Collection: Alone
I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.Collection: Science
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.
Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.
Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.
I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.
To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.
I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.