quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

"And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"And so it goes..."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"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

"Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"All this happened, more or less."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"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.'"
— Kurt Vonnegut (Timequake)

"The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do aferward. "
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way to make life more bearable. "
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions)