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The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.

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.
Beings
Cruel
Order
Sane
Human
Superior
Humans
Superiors
Important
Anyway
Crucifix
Message
Unspeakably
Messages
Supposedly
Authority
Orders

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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I'm wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, bewildered am I.
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Music makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it.
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The worst thing about film, from my point of view, is that it cripples illusions which I have encouraged people to create in their heads. Film doesn't create illusion. It makes them impossible. It is a bullying form of reality, like the model rooms in the furniture department of Bloomingdale's.
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Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren.
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Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the universe has been unknown to us so far. We serve as well as we can to the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don't read much or think much -- who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The Fourteenth Book is entitled, What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years? It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: Nothing.
Kurt Vonnegut
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If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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?
Kurt Vonnegut
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Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple years back by the wife of our President: Just say no.
Kurt Vonnegut
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When the last living thing Has died on account of us, How poetical it would be If Earth could say, In a voice floating up Perhaps From the floor Of the Grand Canyon, It is done. People did not like it here.
Kurt Vonnegut
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What the Gospels actually said was: don't kill anyone until you are absolutely sure they aren't well connected.
Kurt Vonnegut
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You are being suffocated by tradition... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art ---it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants.
Kurt Vonnegut
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People would be surprised if they knew how much in this world was due to prayers.
Kurt Vonnegut
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One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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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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
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The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren't and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why.
Kurt Vonnegut