More - Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

Kurt Vonnegut

 American Author Class

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people.

Kurt Vonnegut

 Illusion

Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism; Iraq in cynical money-making. And there's no optimism or idealism now -- Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. We're proud of being ignorant; that leaves virtue at our core. We aren't frazzled by knowledge like foreigners, so we can be trusted.

Kurt Vonnegut

 

We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. Only in superstition is there hope. If you want to become a friend of civilization, then become an enemy of the truth and a fanatic for harmless balderdash.

Kurt Vonnegut

 Government Superstition

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.

Kurt Vonnegut

 American Author

It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can't get out of, but I think this is very usual in life. There is the implication that if you just have a little more energy, a little more fight, the problem can always be solved. This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry--or laugh.

Kurt Vonnegut

 

Almost every war ends, properly, with its veterans feeling deceived and pointless and gullible, with their being persuaded that all participants were equally vile.

Kurt Vonnegut

 

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion . . . . I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

Kurt Vonnegut

 

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.

Kurt Vonnegut

 American Author

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

Kurt Vonnegut

 American Author