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I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.

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.
Hate
Fear
Ideas
Diseases
Book
Disease
Americans
Taught
Books
Though

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.
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And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
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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?
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There's a Chaplain who never visited the front.
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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.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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.
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As stupid and vicious as men are, this is a lovely day.
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Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Every writer has to write his speech.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Son--they say there isn't any royalty in this country, but do you want me to tell you how to be king of the United States of America? Just fall through the hole in a privy and come out smelling like a rose.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Laughter or crying is what a human being does when there's nothing else he can do.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.
Kurt Vonnegut
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How important my books are or anybody's books are, I don't know. I don't think they are terribly important I think that they make people contented during the period they are reading them and this is worth something is to take care of somebody for a couple of hours.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
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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How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
Kurt Vonnegut
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There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in church quite a lot).
Kurt Vonnegut