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Only in books do we learn what’s really going on.

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
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Indianapolis
Indiana
Kurt Vonnegut
Jr.
Books
Learn
Book
Going
Really

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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Evolution is a mistake. Humans are a mistake. We've destroyed our planet.
Kurt Vonnegut
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High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again.
Kurt Vonnegut
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If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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.
Kurt Vonnegut
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We're here on Earth to fart around
Kurt Vonnegut
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Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.
Kurt Vonnegut
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My ancient history teacher, Millie Lloyd, should have worn a medal for her performance at the battle of Thermopylae. She was excited and we were excited.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I don't know what anybody else in the world would want to thank America for, but man, it [jazz] works. What I like about it - and what public health people ought to like about it - it's safe sex.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I'm a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.
Kurt Vonnegut
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It's a terrible waste to be happy and not notice it.
Kurt Vonnegut
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For a Russian to be chivalrous with an American is a spiritual impossibility, a conradiction in terms.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the universe has been unknown to us so far. We serve as well as we can to the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I love you, Eliza,” I said. She thought about it. “No,” she said at last, “I don’t like it.” “Why not?” I said. “It’s as though you were pointing a gun at my head,” she said. “It’s just a way of getting somebody to say something they probably don’t mean. What else can I say, or anybody say, but, ‘I love you, too’?
Kurt Vonnegut
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Incidentally, I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the great science fiction writer and biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov. John Updike, who is religious, says I talk more about God than any seminarian. Socialism is, in fact, a form of Christianity, people wishing to imitate Christ.
Kurt Vonnegut
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In this world, you get what you pay for.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.
Kurt Vonnegut
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It is time for me to be dead for a little while - and then live again.
Kurt Vonnegut