Sucker's Portfolio Quotes

“I asked him once what he believed to be the basic flaw in the character of Germans, and he replied “obedience.” When I consider the ghastly orders obeyed by underlings of Columbus, or of Aztec priests supervising human sacrifices, or of senile Chinese bureaucrats wishing to silence unarmed, peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square only three years ago as I write, I have to wonder if obedience isn’t the basic flaw in most of humankind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Sucker's Portfolio

“any technical advance that was conceivable to the mind would one day be made a reality by scientists.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Sucker's Portfolio

“Ridiculous! Why don’t you go into gunrunning, and sell the ancient Athenians a couple of machine guns so they can win the Peloponnesian War?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Sucker's Portfolio

“He could not see that time — not cancer or heart disease or any other disease in his books — was the most frightening, crippling plague of mankind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“To “stand around with egg on one’s face” is not to be confused with “standing around with one’s thumb up one’s fundament,” which means not knowing what to do next, as does “not knowing whether to defecate or wind one’s watch.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Sucker's Portfolio

“As consolation, I offer this prayer attributed to the great German-American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), possibly as early as 1937, in the depths of the planetary economic depression before this one: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” - Sagaponack, 1992”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“I told Peltier in a letter about the similarities between their prosecutors and his, and added what I think is true: The Italians back in the 1920s and earlier seemed as non-white to this country’s ruling class as Indians. And so seemed Greeks and Jews and Spaniards and Portuguese.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“This rang a bell with me. I had written some about the Italian-American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were electrocuted in Massachusetts for the murder of a payroll guard, in 1927, when I was only five. I knew that one of their prosecutors had said very much the same thing about them, that they were certainly guilty of something terrible, although unspecifiable in court. Again, another man had confessed to the crime, but they went to the “hot seat” anyway.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“Thanksgiving Day, the most agreeable of all our national holidays. It commemorates a feast in 1621 given by English invaders of what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, to which Native Americans came as most welcome guests.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“Let us give poor old Columbus a rest. He was a human being of his times, and aren’t we all? We are all so often bad news for somebody else. AIDS, I read somewhere, was probably brought into this country by a Canadian flight attendant on an international flight. And what had his crime been? Nothing but love, love, love. That’s life sometimes. And he is surely as dead as Columbus now. And I’m killing the world with garbage, three cans a week, sort of like Chinese water torture.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“better analogue of TV’s wake in the space-time continuum is a black hole into which even the greatest crimes and stupidities, and indeed whole continents, if need be, can be made to disappear from our consciousness.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“Another native German Heinrich, Heinrich Böll, a great writer, and I became friends even though we had once been corporals in opposing armies. I asked him once what he believed to be the basic flaw in the character of Germans, and he replied “obedience.” When I consider the ghastly orders obeyed by underlings of Columbus, or of Aztec priests supervising human sacrifices, or of senile Chinese bureaucrats wishing to silence unarmed, peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square only three years ago as I write, I have to wonder if obedience isn’t the basic flaw in most of humankind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“Sydney was acknowledging two stressful subjects at once: The Gentile habit of making scapegoats of Jews, of course; and the growing body of opinion here that the behavior of Columbus and so many of the Europeans who came after him toward the Native Americans, the people who had already discovered America, was loathsome, to say the least. Our mutual friend, the historian and ardent conservationist Kirkpatrick Sale, had just published a generally well-received book, The Conquest of Paradise, which proved by means of contemporaneous documents that Columbus, far from being a hero, was almost insanely greedy and cruel.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“But making a spine for history out of memorized dates has the side effect of teaching that human destiny is governed by sudden and explosive events, strictly localized in space and time. The truth is that we are the playthings of systems as complex and turbulent as the weather systems pondered by my big brother Bernard.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“Einstein’s E=mc2 and so on — to which he attaches kings and generals and politicians and explorers and so on.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“My big brother, the physical chemist Dr. Bernard Vonnegut, who studies the electrification of thunderstorms, gives his view of history a spine of scientific insights — Newton’s Laws of Motion and Einstein’s E=mc2 and so on — to which he attaches kings and”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“A scientist friend had once remarked audaciously, with a few fingers of whisky in him, that any technical advance that was conceivable to the mind would one day be made a reality by scientists. It was conceivable that man could travel to other planets; that would come to pass. It was conceivable that a machine could be made more intelligent than men; that would come to pass. It was conceivable to David that he might return to Jeanette.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“he read and reread the definition of the word between timid and Timbuktu: “the general idea, relation, or fact of continuous or successive existence.” Impatiently, David snapped the book shut between his long fingers. The word was time. He ached to understand time, to defy it, to defeat it — to go back, not forward — to go back to the moments with his wife Jeanette, to the moments time had swept away.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“Mark Twain, not long before he died a bitter old man, was writing a book much like John Latham’s, pretending to be helpful but actually calling attention to how humbling life, and especially its endings, can be. Twain’s was about etiquette. His advice on how to behave at a funeral, I remember, included, “Do not bring your dog.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“The play must go on,” said John. “Or something,” I said.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“piles of champagne-colored hair.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“Tartuffe.” Tartuffe is a hypocrite in a French play we put on one time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“I doubt if he’s got any immunity to any disease at all,” said John. “He’s never been exposed to anything.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“What impressed me most about Fred Lovell, though, was the heavy perfume of booze.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“He permitted himself the childish pleasure of feeling mysterious, of imagining what an outsider might make of the scene. It was a winter’s high noon, darker than autumn twilight, without snow to brighten the overcast countryside. To the outsider, David reflected cheerfully, Nature would be seeming to sympathize with macabre doings in the studio. Desultory rain from a pocket of warmth thousands of feet above earth spattered and froze on the windowsills.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“Hazily, he had the impression of being on the verge of outwitting time — of being about to rise above it, about to go wherever he liked into the past.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“We are incorrigibly the nastiest of all animals, as our history attests, and that is that. *** I have said almost nothing about those of us in the USA who are the descendants of black African slaves.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“He would die for a moment, explore eternity, revive, and tell the living that every instant they lived was as permanent a part of the universe as the largest constellation. In men’s minds, time would cease to be a killer.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“He felt like a traveler between trains in a small town on Sunday, without the wish or hope of seeing a familiar face, smoking cigarette after bitter cigarette. He seemed without identity even to himself until he could be on his way.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio

“A scientist friend had once remarked audaciously, with a few fingers of whisky in him, that any technical advance that was conceivable to the mind would one day be made a reality by scientists. It was conceivable that man could travel to other planets; that would come to pass. It was conceivable that a machine could be made more intelligent than men; that would come to pass. It was conceivable to David that he might return to Jeanette. He closed his eyes. It was inconceivable that he could never see her again…”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sucker's Portfolio