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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.
Comfort
Mankind
Even
Never
Life
Risked
Shame
Service
More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut
No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious & charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.
Kurt Vonnegut
It's incumbent on the President to entertain. Clinton did a better job of it - and was forgiven for the scandals, incidentally. Bush is entertaining us with what I call the Republican Super Bowl, which is played by the lower classes using live ammunition.
Kurt Vonnegut
I love cell phones. I see people so happy and proud, walking around. Gesturing, you know. I'm like Karl Marx, I'm up for anything that makes people happy.
Kurt Vonnegut
I'm wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, bewildered am I.
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
Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don't stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect. Live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy. Get somebody to teach you to play a musical instrument.
Kurt Vonnegut
You are being suffocated by tradition... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art ---it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants.
Kurt Vonnegut
Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.
Kurt Vonnegut
What is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?
Kurt Vonnegut
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
It seems to me divorce is so common now. It ought to be more institutionalized. It's like a head-on collision every time. It's supposed to be a surprise but it's commonplace.
Kurt Vonnegut
You know who was a hero? Franklin Roosevelt.
Kurt Vonnegut
One thing I found out was that we need extended families. We need gangs. And, of course, if they're tribes and clans and so forth have been dispersed by the industrial revolution by people looking for work wherever they can find it. And a nuclear family, a man, a woman and kids and a dog and cat is no survival scheme at all. Horribly vulnerable.
Kurt Vonnegut
My ancestors were all Freethinkers, formerly Catholics. It was science and Darwin, in particular, that made them decide, as educated people, which they were, that the priest, nice as he was, didn't know what he was talking about.
Kurt Vonnegut
He did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way.
Kurt Vonnegut
Artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.
Kurt Vonnegut
She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.
Kurt Vonnegut
The triumph of anything is a matter of organization.
Kurt Vonnegut
When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away.
Kurt Vonnegut
If I was ever to have a child, this is what I'd tell it: 'Child,' I'd say, 'don't never mess with time. Keep now now and then then. And if you ever get lost in thick smoke, child, set still till it clears. Set still till you can see where you are and where you been and where you're going, child.
Kurt Vonnegut
