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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

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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.
Thinking
Discover
People
Survival
Machines
Minds
Instead
Interest
Agreeing
Thought
Trained
Mind
Interests

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No. So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.
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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.
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Anyone unable to understand how useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.
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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.
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You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I would not be interested in writing if I didn't feel that what I wrote was an act of good citizenship or an attempt, at any rate, to be a good citizen.
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The person who writes the bank's commercials is not the person who makes the loans.
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People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn't own doodley-squat, so they couldn't improve their surroundings. so they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.
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If somebody says, I love you, to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires? I love you, too.
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...Skyscraper National Park
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The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Out in the world I go! Muggers! Autograph hounds! Junkies! People with real jobs! Maybe an easy lay! United Nation functionaries and diplomats!
Kurt Vonnegut
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That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.
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We have such a young culture that there is an opportunity to contribute wonderful new myths to it, which will be accepted.
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A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.
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Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
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The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I am beguiled by your physical beauty, and I am moved by how head-over-heels in love with books you are. And nowhere else have I found such thoughtful and literate reportage on the state of the American soul, as that soul makes itself known in the books we write.
Kurt Vonnegut
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And what is literature, Rabo, he said, but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'.
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