Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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.
Machines
Minds
Instead
Interest
Agreeing
Thought
Trained
Mind
Interests
Thinking
Discover
People
Survival
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
And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.
Kurt Vonnegut
Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch: everything stops.
Kurt Vonnegut
What is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?
Kurt Vonnegut
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.
Kurt Vonnegut
The city was blacked out because bombers might come, so Billy didn't get to see Dresden do one of the most cheerful things a city can do when the sun goes down, which is to wink its lights on one by one.
Kurt Vonnegut
The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth.
Kurt Vonnegut
The Circle Theatre, black people had to sit in the balcony. Any theater with a balcony, black people had to sit up there. Black people couldn't check into any hotel except their own. And black people couldn't eat anywhere except in their own restaurants.
Kurt Vonnegut
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.
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
The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on? she asked me. The big show is inside my head, I said.
Kurt Vonnegut
That’s the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind.
Kurt Vonnegut
The system promotes to the top those who don't care about the planet.
Kurt Vonnegut
The most racist, nastiest act by America, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki. Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away yellow men, women, and children. I'm glad I'm not a scientist because I'd feel so guilty now.
Kurt Vonnegut
All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.
Kurt Vonnegut
Powers Hapgood had just come from court because there was some kind of dust-up on a picket line. The judge was so curious about him - coming from a rich family - why he would choose to live as he had. I guess you know what his answer was ...The Sermon on the Mount, sir. That's important.
Kurt Vonnegut
We are all experiments in enthusiasms, narrow and preordained.
Kurt Vonnegut
I taught writing for a while and whenever somebody would tell me they were going to write about their dad, I would tell them they might as well go write about killing puppies because neither story was going to work. It just doesn't work.
Kurt Vonnegut
Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics.
Kurt Vonnegut
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.
Kurt Vonnegut
