Armageddon in Retrospect Quotes

“My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Armageddon in Retrospect

“He often said he had to be a writer because he wasn't good at anything else. He was not good at being an employee. Back in the mid-1950's, he was employed for Sports Illustrated, briefly. He reported back to work, was asked to write a short piece on a racehorse that jumped over a fence and tried to run away. Kurt stared at the blank piece of paper all morning and then typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence," and walked out, self-employed again.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Armageddon in Retrospect

“Even as I speak, the very last polar bear may be dying of hunger on account of climate change, on account of us. And I sure miss the polar bears. Their babies are so warm and cuddly and trusting, just like ours.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“The very best thing you can be in life is a teacher, provided you are crazy in love with what you teach, and that your classes consist of eighteen students or fewer. Classes of eighteen students or fewer are a family, and feel and act like one.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Armageddon in Retrospect

“The most radical, audacious thing to think is that there might be some point to working hard and thinking hard and reading hard and writing hard and trying to be of service”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Armageddon in Retrospect

“And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don't already have one.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“We accepted their congratulations with good grace and proper modesty, but I felt then as I feel now, that I would have given my life to save Dresden for the world’s generations to come. That is how everyone should feel about every city on earth.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“And what gift of America to the rest of the world is actually most appreciated by the rest of the world? It is African American jazz and its offshoots. What is my definition of jazz? "Safe sex of the highest order.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“And somebody might now want to ask me, "Can't you ever be serious?" The answer is, "No.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Armageddon in Retrospect

“How subservient to Jesus, or to a humane God Almighty, were the leaders of this country back in the 1840's, when Marx said such a supposedly evil thing about religion? They had made it perfectly legal to own human slaves, and weren't going to led women vote or hold public office, God forbid, for another eighty year.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“I wouldn't be a doctor for anything. That's the worst job.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are. That you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Armageddon in Retrospect

“The most spiritually splendid American phenomenon of my lifetime is how African-American citizens have maintained their dignity and self-respect, despite their having been treated by white Americans, both in and out of government, and simply because of their skin color, as though they were contemptible and loathsome, and even diseased.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“And, if you'll investigate the history of science, my dear boy, I think you'll find that most of the really big ideas have come from intelligent playfulness. All the sober, thin-lipped concentration is really just a matter of tidying up around the fringes of the big ideas.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“Soft citizens of the American democracy learned to kick a man below the belt and make the bastard scream. ”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“I feel now, that I would have given my life to save Dresden for the World’s generations to come. That is how everyone should feel about every city on Earth.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“But I stand convinced that the brand of justice in which we dealt, wholesale bombings of civilian populations, was blasphemous.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“It is with some regret that I here besmirch the nobility of our airmen, but boys, you killed an appalling lot of women and children.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“This is the best of times and the worst of times. So what else is new? The bad news is that the Martians have landed in Manhattan, and have checked in at the Waldorf-Astoria. The good news is that they only eat homeless people of all colors, and they pee gasoline.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“If you can’t learn about reading and writing from Kurt, maybe you should be doing something else.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“Fear hadn’t come to him yet. Pain hadn’t come where pain would come. There was only the feeling of having done something perfect at last—the taste of a drink from a cold, pure spring.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“A twerp was defined as a guy who put his set of false teeth up his rear end and bit the buttons off the backseats of taxicabs.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“But there are still plenty of people who will tell you that the most evil thing about Karl Marx was what he said about religion. He said it was the opium of the lower classes, as though he thought religion was bad for people, and he wanted to get rid of it. But when Marx said that, back in the 1840s, his use of the word “opium” wasn’t simply metaphorical. Back then real opium was the only painkiller available, for toothaches or cancer of the throat, or whatever. He himself had used it. As a sincere friend of the downtrodden, he was saying he was glad they had something which could ease their pain at least a little bit, which was religion. He liked religion for doing that, and certainly didn’t want to abolish it. OK? He might have said today as I say tonight, “Religion can be Tylenol for a lot of unhappy people, and I’m so glad it works.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“Well, I’m sure you know that our country is the only so-called advanced nation that still has a death penalty. And torture chambers. I mean, why screw around? But listen: If anyone here should wind up on a gurney in a lethal-injection facility, maybe the one at Terre Haute, here is what your last words should be: “This will certainly teach me a lesson.” If Jesus were alive today, we would kill him with lethal injection. I call that progress. We would have to kill him for the same reason he was killed the first time. His ideas are just too liberal.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“During the Great Depression, African-American citizens were heard to say this, along with a lot of other stuff, of course: “Things are so bad white folks got to raise their own kids.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“The wreckers against the builders!” said Elmer. “There’s the whole story of life!”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“The occupying Russians, when they discovered that we were Americans, embraced us and congratulated us on the complete desolation our planes had wrought. We accepted their congratulations with good grace and proper modesty, but I felt then as I feel now, that I would have given my life to save Dresden for the World's generations to come. That is how everyone should feel about every city on Earth.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“It was a war of reason against barbarism, supposedly, with the issues at stake on such a high plane that most of our feverish fighters had no idea why they were fighting—other than that the enemy was a bunch of bastards.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect