Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007)
American novelist known for works blending satire, black comedy, and science fiction.
You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff. You're not expecting it.
People hate it when they're tickled because laughter is not pleasant, if it goes on too long. I think it's a desperate sort of convulsion in desperate circumstances, which helps a little.
When I was a naive young recruit in Spain, I used to wonder why soldiers bayoneted oil paintings, shot the noses off statues and defecated into grand pianos. I now understand: it was to teach civilians the deepest sort of respect for men in uniform — uncontrollable fear.
About astrology and palmistry: They are good because they make people feel vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.
Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.
The new heroism — put a village idiot into a pressure cooker, seal it up tight, and shoot him at the moon.
He alienated his friends in the sciences by thanking them extravagantly for scientific advances he had read about in the recent newspapers and magazines, by assuring them, with a perfectly straight face, that life was getting better and better, thanks to scientific thinking.
Don't lecture me on race relations. I don't have a molecule of prejudice. I've been in battle with every kind of man there is. I've been in bed with every kind of woman there is — from a Laplander to a Tierra del Fuegian. If I'd ever been to the South Pole, there'd be a hell of a lot of penguins who looked like me.
Ta ta and adios. Or, as Saint Peter said to me with a sly wink, when I told him I was on my last-round trip to Paradise: “See you later, Alligator.”
Things die. All things die.
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.
Roses are red
And ready for plucking
You're sixteen
And ready for high school.
So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget.
I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty — and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine.
Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.
His plan? To pass out weapons to slaves, so they could overthrow their masters. Suicide.
Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.
I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment."
And 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.
Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science.