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Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me.
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.
Life
Risked
Shame
Service
Comfort
Mankind
Even
Never
More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut
My country is in ruins. So I'm a fish in a poisoned fishbowl. I'm mostly just heartsick about this. There should have been hope. This should have been a great country. But we are despised all over the world now. I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That's why I served in World War II, and that's why I wrote books.
Kurt Vonnegut
I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.
Kurt Vonnegut
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
Kurt Vonnegut
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.
Kurt Vonnegut
Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.
Kurt Vonnegut
I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for--to find out how much a man could take without breaking.
Kurt Vonnegut
I've been living alone for so long, everything about me’s private. I’m surprised anyone’s able to understand a word I say.
Kurt Vonnegut
Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.
Kurt Vonnegut
... uncritical love is the only real treasure.
Kurt Vonnegut
So let's give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That'll teach bin Laden a lesson he won't soon forget.
Kurt Vonnegut
The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.
Kurt Vonnegut
What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!
Kurt Vonnegut
. . . hummings and clickings could be heard-the sounds attendant to the flow of electrons, now augmenting one maze of electromagnetic crises to a condition that was translatable from electrical qualities and quantities to a high grade of truth.
Kurt Vonnegut
It shook up Trout to realize that even he could bring evil into the world — in the form of bad ideas.
Kurt Vonnegut
It's perfectly ordinary to be a socialist. It's perfectly normal to be in favor of fire departments.
Kurt Vonnegut
A nice thing about war-not that anything about war is nice, I guess-is that while it's going on and you're in it, you never worry about doing the right thing.
Kurt Vonnegut
I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. But they are murdered children all the same.
Kurt Vonnegut
Being an American means never having to say you're sorry.
Kurt Vonnegut
The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.
Kurt Vonnegut
What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.
Kurt Vonnegut
