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I wasn't aware of Ku Klux Klan as I was aware of the widespread assumption that African-Americans were dumber than white people. I think my father believed that. I think everybody white did.

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.
Everybody
Klan
White
Widespread
Father
African
Think
Assumption
Thinking
Believed
People
Aware
Americans
Klux
Wasn
Dumber

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We were all gun nuts and they were called varmints, crows were, because they ate grain and so did we.
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Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals.
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I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for--to find out how much a man could take without breaking.
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The Circle Theatre, black people had to sit in the balcony. Any theater with a balcony, black people had to sit up there. Black people couldn't check into any hotel except their own. And black people couldn't eat anywhere except in their own restaurants.
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[People] want to feel superior, so they imagine we're Bible thumpers and uneducated and all that.
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Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.
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Laughter or crying is what a human being does when there's nothing else he can do.
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There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers.
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I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.
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Beer, of course, is actually a depressant, but poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.
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The painting was framed in a misty view of sky, sea, and valley. Newt's painting was small, black, and warty. It consisted of scratches made in a black, gummy impasto. The scratches formed a sort of spider's web, and I wondered if they might not be the sticky nets of human futility hung up on a moonless night to dry.
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Just in the nick of time they realized that it was their own habitat they were wrecking -- that they weren't merely visitors.
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The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.
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We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding.
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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.
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I taught writing for a while and whenever somebody would tell me they were going to write about their dad, I would tell them they might as well go write about killing puppies because neither story was going to work. It just doesn't work.
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I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian]
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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.
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I went to high school in Indianapolis I learned how to walk around looking tough because everybody had to do that. I go out there occasionally and they're still doing it, walking around looking very tough because something might happen.
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There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.
Kurt Vonnegut