Kurt Vonnegut Quotes - Page 7

The human beings also passed canteens, which guards would fill with water. When food came in, the human beings were quiet and trusting and beautiful. They shared.

The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.

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.

On the eighth day, the forty-year-old hobo said to Billy: "This ain't bad. I can be comfortable anywhere."
"You can?" said Billy.
On the ninth day the hobo died. So it goes. His last words were: "You think this is bad? This ain't bad.

When I got home from my war, my uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he bellowed, 'You're a MAN now!'

I damn near killed my first German.

My God, what have they done to you? This isn't a man, it's a broken kite.

As long as they killed people with conventional rather than nuclear weapons, they were praised as humanitarian statesmen. As long as they did not use nuclear weapons, it appeared, nobody was going to give the right name to all the killing that had been going on since the end of the Second World War, which was surely “World War Three.

They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

Five German soldiers and a police dog on a leash were looking down into the bed of the creek. The soldiers' blue eyes were filled with a bleary civilian curiosity as to why one American would try to murder another one so far from home, and why the victim should laugh.

Sem, šī grāmata ir tik īsa, tik saraustīta un tik nesakarīga tāpēc, ka par slaktiņiem neko īsti sakarīgu uzrakstīt nevar. Kad tie beigušies, visiem pieklājas būt mirušiem, neko vairs nesacīt, neko vairs nevēlēties.

Flashlight beams danced crazily

It was humanity's ability to heal so quickly, by means of babies, which encouraged so many people to think of explosions as show business, as highly theatrical forms of self-expression, and little more.

Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art.

Painters-and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!

We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten.... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.

Aside from battles, the history of nations seemed to consist of nothing but powerless old poops like myself, heavily medicated and vaguely beloved in the long ago, coming to kiss the boots of young psychopaths.

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.

What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain.

There is no peace, I'm sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.