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Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?

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.
Plato
Worth
Says
Turns
Living
Wells
Well
Unexamined
Life
Examined

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.
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The youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation.
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You had to get everything exactly right or the editors would give you hell.
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The highest treason in the USA is to say Americans are not loved, no matter where they are, no matter what they are doing there.
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the late twentieth century will go down in history, i'm sure, as an era of pharmaceutical buffoonery.
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The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.
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Our classes were relatively small. Those small classes can feel like family. After a class in French or chemistry or whatever, we'd be talking in the halls about what we just learned.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.
Kurt Vonnegut
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We were all gun nuts and they were called varmints, crows were, because they ate grain and so did we.
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Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?
Kurt Vonnegut
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The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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
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Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Well here you are, there it is, THIS is what it's all about.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Ink and paper are as cheap as sand or water, almost. No board of directors has to convene in order to decide whether we can afford to write down this or that. I myself once staged the end of the world on two pieces of paper- at a cost of ...less than a penny, including wear and tear on my typewriter ribbon and the seat of my pants. 'Think of that.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I've written about Powers Hapgood. He was a Harvard graduate, son of a wealthy family who owned a cannery out there. After leaving Harvard, he went to work in coal mines and then was a CIO executive when I met him there, in Indianapolis.
Kurt Vonnegut
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There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers.
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