Quote

there i was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic tv, with virtually no health services for the poor. where to go? what to do?

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.
Nations
Sold
Foreigners
Age
Assets
Superstition
Looted
Poor
Whose
Plague
Swamped
Cutting
Virtually
Plagues
Late
Thoroughly
Unchecked
Nation
Superstitions
Hypnotic
Health
Loose
Illiteracy
Middle
Services
Bankrupt

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian]
Kurt Vonnegut
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All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.
Kurt Vonnegut
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... uncritical love is the only real treasure.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Human beings are about 1,000 times dumber and meaner than they think they are.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.
Kurt Vonnegut
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That's what my books are, now that I'm a grownup - mosaics of jokes.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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
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Cigarettes are a classy way to commit suiside.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC.
Kurt Vonnegut
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It's the writer's job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all.
Kurt Vonnegut
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But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.
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.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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
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People are only animals, but special animals. Every animal has fought and killed to survive, even before the dinosaurs. We're the only ones that do it for fun. That's why I don't know about Darwinism. Supposedly evolution and natural selection are all about survival, but we haven't gotten smarter over the years, only more dangerous.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I beg you to believe the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or frustrateor of the grandest dreams of God Almighty.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The paintings by dead men who were poor most of their lives are the most valuable pieces in my collection. And if an artist wants to really jack up the prices of his creations, may I suggest this: suicide.
Kurt Vonnegut