Kurt Vonnegut is best known for his best-selling novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which was released in 1969. Aside from that title, he had a prolific career, writing everything from plays to short stories to full-length nonfiction.
Vonnegut’s powerful messages were delivered creatively—and often quite satirically—drawing on his experiences of war, life, and love, ensuring that they stood the test of time.
1. “But his head no longer sheltered ideas of how things could be and should be on the planet, as opposed to how they really were. There was only one way for the Earth to be, he thought: the way it was.” – Kurt Vonnegut
2. “The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don’t apply any more.
People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines.” – Kurt Vonnegut
3. “And the charming little cottage he’d taken as a symbol of the good life of a farmer was as irrelevant as a statue of Venus at the gate of a sewage-disposal plant.” – Kurt Vonnegut
4. “But you find out quick enough that old friends are old friends, and nothing more—no wiser, no more help than anyone else.” – Kurt Vonnegut
5. “You know what else I think? I think life is no way to treat an animal, and not just people, but pigs and chickens, too. Life just hurts too much.” – Kurt Vonnegut
6. “But I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there.
And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin with.” – Kurt Vonnegut
7. “Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
8. “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, Cat’s Cradle
9. “No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s. . .No damn cat, and no damn cradle.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
10. “Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before… He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.” – Kurt Vonnegut
11. “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” – Kurt Vonnegut
12. “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
13. “I admire anybody who finishes a work of art, no matter how awful it may be.” – Kurt Vonnegut
14. “I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.” – Kurt Vonnegut
15. “Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, ‘There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.’” – Kurt Vonnegut
16. “That’s what it was to be young—to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday
17. “Be aware of this truth that the people on this earth could be joyous, if only they would live rationally, and if they would contribute mutually to each others’ welfare.” – Kurt Vonnegut
18. “Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.” – Kurt Vonnegut
19. “How nice—to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.” – Kurt Vonnegut
20. “The poetry of four seasons is all wrong for this part of the planet, and this may explain why we are so depressed so much of the time.” – Kurt Vonnegut
21. “That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.” – Kurt Vonnegut
22. “So I hope that you will do the same for the rest of your lives. When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’” – Kurt Vonnegut
23. “I am being so silly because I pity you so much. I pity all of us so much. Life is going to be very tough again, just as soon as this is over.
And the most useful thought we can hold when all hell cuts loose again is that we are not members of different generations, as unlike, as some people would have us believe, as Eskimos and Australian Aborigines.
We are all so close to each other in time that we should think of ourselves as brothers and sisters.” – Kurt Vonnegut
24. “Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.” – Kurt Vonnegut
25. “Nobody’s so damn well educated that you can’t learn ninety percent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten percent is decoration.” – Kurt Vonnegut
26. “People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do.
They didn’t own doodley-squat, so they couldn’t improve their surroundings. So they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.” – Kurt Vonnegut
27. “The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.’” – Kurt Vonnegut
28. “That is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.” – Kurt Vonnegut
29. “You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages–they haven’t ended yet.” – Kurt Vonnegut
30. “Egregious. Most people think that word means terrible or unheard of or unforgivable. It has a much more interesting story than that to tell. It means ‘outside the herd.’ Imagine that–thousands of people, outside the herd.” – Kurt Vonnegut
31. “What passes for a culture in my head is really a bunch of commercials, and this is intolerable. It may be impossible to live without a culture.” – Kurt Vonnegut
32. “Here is my understanding of the Universe and mankind’s place in it at the present time: The seeming curvature of the Universe is an illusion.
The Universe is really as straight as a string, except for a loop at either end. The loops are microscopic. One tip of the string is forever vanishing.” – Kurt Vonnegut
33. “My longer-range schemes have to do with providing all Americans with artificial extended families of a thousand members or more.
Only when we have overcome loneliness can we begin to share wealth and work more fairly. I honestly believe that we will have those families by-and-by, and I hope they will become international.” – Kurt Vonnegut
34. “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” – Kurt Vonnegut
35. “In real life, as in Grand Opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.” – Kurt Vonnegut
36. “Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!” – Kurt Vonnegut
Quotes about Time
Many of Vonnegut’s best-known works explore our misunderstandings of time. Slaughterhouse-Five, for example, is based on a time-traveler, and Time quake is set in a world where people must repeat their lives every ten years on autopilot.
Though these works are best understood when heard in their entirety, the following quotes will give you an idea of the types of questions Vonnegut poses about time.
37. “There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
38. “It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.” – Kurt Vonnegut
39. “Actors know everything they are going to say and do, and how everything is going to come out in the end, for good or ill, when the curtain goes up on Act One, Scene One.
Yet they have no choice but to behave as though the future were a mystery.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
40. “Listen, if it isn’t a timequake dragging us through knothole after knothole, it’s something else just as mean and powerful.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
41. “The timequake of 2001 was a cosmic charley horse in the sinews of Destiny. At what was in New York City 2:27 p.m. on February 13th of that year, the Universe suffered a crisis in self-confidence. Should it go on expanding indefinitely? What was the point?” – Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
42. “This was when Billy first came unstuck in time. His attention began to swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light.
There wasn’t anybody else there, or any thing. There was just violet light—and a hum.” – Kurt Vonnegut
43. “All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.” – Kurt Vonnegut
44. “All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.” – Kurt Vonnegut
Quotes about War and Death
Vonnegut had many thoughts on life, but as a World War II veteran, he also had many thoughts on death.
Many critics and fans argue that his works are among the most honest and understandable depictions of war and death in literature, possibly due to his use of dark humor.
45. “If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I’ve said… It is time for you to go home to your wives and children, and it is time for me to be dead for a little while—and then live again.” – Kurt Vonnegut
46. “The nicest veterans… the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.” – Kurt Vonnegut
47. “If I should ever die, again God forbid, I hope some of you will say, ‘Kurt’s up in Heaven now.’ That’s my favorite joke.” – Kurt Vonnegut
48. “I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.” – Kurt Vonnegut
49. “Here is all she had to say about death: ‘Oh my, oh my.’” – Kurt Vonnegut
50. “We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. ‘My God, my God—’, I said to myself. ‘It’s a Children’s Crusade.’” – Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
51. “On other days we have wars as horrible as any you’ve ever seen or read about. There isn’t anything we can do about them, so we simply don’t look at them.
We ignore them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments—like today at the zoo.” – Kurt Vonnegut
52. “The advocates of nuclear disarmament seem to believe that, if they could achieve their aim, war would become tolerable and decent.
They would do well to…ponder the fate of Dresden, where 135,000 people died as the result of an air attack with conventional weapons.” – Kurt Vonnegut
53. “Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”– Kurt Vonnegut
Quotes about Love
The majority of Vonnegut’s work is also about love. Many would argue that he was a romantic at heart, with complex and clever ideas about love. They can speak to the brokenhearted as well as the wistfully in love.
54. “Make love when you can. It’s good for you.” – Kurt Vonnegut
55. “I do not propose to discuss my love life. I will say that I still can’t get over how women are shaped, and that I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs.
I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
56. “There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look. I am proof of that.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
57. “And how can you say a man had a good mind when he couldn’t even bother to do anything when the best-hearted, most beautiful woman in the world, his own wife, was dying for lack of love and understanding.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
58. “They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by.” – Kurt Vonnegut
59. “We Bokononists believe that it is impossible to be sole-to-sole with another person without loving the person, provided the feet of both persons are clean and nicely tended.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
60. “A man who wants all of somebody’s love. That’s very bad.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
61. “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” – Kurt Vonnegut
62. “Americans…are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.” – Kurt Vonnegut
63. “It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.” – Kurt Vonnegut
64. “I will tell you how to win love: wear nice clothing and smile all the time. Learn the words to all the latest songs.” – Kurt Vonnegut
65. “Actually, I am highly suspicious of love, and any honest biography of me would bear that out.” – Kurt Vonnegut
66. “If somebody says, ‘I love you,’ to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but what the pistol-holder requires?” – Kurt Vonnegut
67. “No matter what I was really, no matter what I really meant, uncritical love was what I needed.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
68. “I was sitting alone on a park bench in the sunshine that day, thinking of a fourth play that was beginning to write itself in my mind.
It gave itself a title, which was ‘Das Reich der Zwei’—’Nation of Two.’ It was going to be about the love my wife and I had for each other.
It was going to show how a pair of lovers in a world gone mad could survive by being loyal only to a nation composed of themselves—a nation of two.” – Kurt Vonnegut
69. “The nation of two my Helga and I had—its territory, the territory we defended so jealously, didn’t go much beyond the bounds of our great double bed.
Flat, tufted, springy little country, with my Helga and me for mountains. And, with nothing in my life making sense but love, what a student of geography I was!” – Kurt Vonnegut
70. “My life is nothing but room for you.” – Kurt Vonnegut
“What is the point of life?” is a question Vonnegut often pondered in his works. When one of Vonnegut’s characters, Kilgore Trout, finds the question “What is the purpose of life?” written in a bathroom, his response is:
“To be the eyes and ears and of the Creator of the Universe, given that Vonnegut was an atheist, and thus for him, there is no Creator to report back to, and comments that.
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StudentsandScholarship Team.