"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

"Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."
— Kurt Vonnegut (The Sirens of Titan)

"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."
— Kurt Vonnegut (The Sirens of Titan)

"And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"When the last living thing
Has died on account of us,
How poetical it would be
If Earth could say,
In a voice floating up
Perhaps
From the floor
Of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all."
— Kurt Vonnegut (The Sirens of Titan)

"Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle)

"If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say."
— Kurt Vonnegut

""It was not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do without love.
It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him.
What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity.
Now even that had flickered out.
How long I stood frozen there, I cannot say. If I was ever going to move again, someone else was going to have to furnish the reason for moving.
Somebody did.
A policeman watched me for a while, and then he came over to me, and he said, "You alright?"
"Yes," I said.
"You've been standing here a long time," he said.
"I know," I said.
"You waiting for somebody?" he said.
"No," I said.
"Better move on, don't you think?" he said.
"Yes, sir," I said.
And I moved on."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

"In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases"
— John Irving (The World According to Garp)

"It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead."
— Joseph Heller

"The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.
"
— Joseph Heller

"'What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for."
— Joseph Heller (Catch-22)

"War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "
— George Orwell

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever."
— George Orwell (1984)

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
— George Orwell

"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
— Mark Twain

"But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?"
— Mark Twain

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away."
— Henry David Thoreau

"The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude."
— Aldous Huxley

"I want you to see what real courage is before you think that it's some man with a gun in his hand. Courage is when you go into a fight knowing you're gonna get licked but you go in anyway and don't give up till it's over."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)