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I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Kurt Vonnegut
Age: 84 †
Born: 1922
Born: November 11
Died: 2007
Died: April 14
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Peace Activist
Philosopher
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Science Fiction Writer
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Writer
Indianapolis
Indiana
Kurt Vonnegut
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More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut
Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people's blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed.
Kurt Vonnegut
But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.
Kurt Vonnegut
Just in the nick of time they realized that it was their own habitat they were wrecking -- that they weren't merely visitors.
Kurt Vonnegut
I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write, I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing. In the water I am beautiful.
Kurt Vonnegut
It strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that man can always solve his problems ... This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry-or laugh.
Kurt Vonnegut
What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.
Kurt Vonnegut
I can't tell if you're serious or not,' said the driver. I won't know myself until I find out if life is serious or not,' said Trout. 'It's dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean it's serious, too.
Kurt Vonnegut
Socialism is, in fact, a form of Christianity, people wishing to imitate Christ.
Kurt Vonnegut
I wish you'd help me look into a more interesting problem - namely, my sanity.
Kurt Vonnegut
I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.
Kurt Vonnegut
The reason we write fiction is because it's so much easier to exist spending part of each day in an imaginary world.
Kurt Vonnegut
Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.
Kurt Vonnegut
You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them.
Kurt Vonnegut
You know, the Emancipation Proclamation was like giving freedom to domestic animals.
Kurt Vonnegut
So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.
Kurt Vonnegut
Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward - and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner.
Kurt Vonnegut
There are lots of things worth doing that are no way to make a living. They are agreeable ways to make a more agreeable life.
Kurt Vonnegut
It's only recently that I've come to understand that writers are not marginal to our society, that they, in fact, do all our thinking for us, that we are writing myths and our myths are believed, and that old myths are believed until someone writes a new one.
Kurt Vonnegut
The triumph of anything is a matter of organization.
Kurt Vonnegut
It seems to me that the most universal revolutionary wish now or ever is a wish for heaven, a wish by a human being to be honored by angels for something other than beauty or usefulness.
Kurt Vonnegut
