Kurt Vonnegut

“I have no degree in biochemistry, neither do I have one in mechanical engineering, as the Army saw fit to terminate both courses before they were finished.”

“Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although mos...”

“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.”

“I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works...”

“Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.”

“Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That'...”

“My cash cows, the slick magazines, were put out of business by TV.”

“Back in my days as a chemistry student, I used to be quite a technocrat. I was firmly convinced that scientists would have cornered God and photographed Him in color by 1951.”

“I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.”

“If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.”

“I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to te...”

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”

“I now make my living by being impolite. I am clumsy at it.”

“New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.”

“I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.”

“Actually, to be an effective person politically in this country, I think you have to be thirty or over, and also you have to be rich, well-placed, you have to be close to power. And I don't...”

“What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens...”

“I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.”

“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...”

“People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.”