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What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.

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.
Back
Went
Puberty
Always
Maybe
Immature
Men
Came
Ceremony
People
Call
Maturity
Whatever
Mature
Eye
Rough
War
Missing
Away
Boys
Thereafter

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.
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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Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes.
Kurt Vonnegut
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My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.
Kurt Vonnegut
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There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - God damn it, you've got to be kind.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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
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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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Don't worry about your father. He's a perfectly contented, self-sufficient zombie.
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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And we all vied, in saving face, to be the greatest student of human nature, the person with the quickest sense of humor.
Kurt Vonnegut
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You become who you pretend to be.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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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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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Anybody with any sense knows the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar by-and-by.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
Kurt Vonnegut
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My God, the religious right will not acknowledge what a merciful person Jesus was.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.
Kurt Vonnegut
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There is this feeling that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life.
Kurt Vonnegut