Quote

We're a terribly lonesome society. For all I know, all societies are. You can make a few new friends, that's all. You can't change history. History is happening to us now.

Kurt Vonnegut

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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.
Society
History
Change
Lonesome
Make
Terribly
Societies
Happenings
Happening
Friends

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

Image
One [television] program was an interminable exploration of the question: can a woman with a low I.Q. be happily married to a man with a high one? The answer seemed to be yes and no.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
I am beguiled by your physical beauty, and I am moved by how head-over-heels in love with books you are. And nowhere else have I found such thoughtful and literate reportage on the state of the American soul, as that soul makes itself known in the books we write.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
The world is too serious. To get mad at a work of art-because maybe somebody, somewhere is blowing his stack over what I've done-is like getting mad at a hot fudge sundae.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
The youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
You know who was a hero? Franklin Roosevelt.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
. . . but the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
... uncritical love is the only real treasure.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
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
Image
Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing.
Kurt Vonnegut