1,579 Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

Please — a little less love, and a little more common decency.

Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.

I'm mad about being old and I'm mad about being American. Apart from that, OK.

Do I resent rich people? No. The best or worst I can do is notice them. I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money.

The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage - and his children, and his cities, too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still - I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art.

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

I'd rather have written "Cheers" than anything I've written.

The highest treason in the USA is to say Americans are not loved, no matter where they are, no matter what they are doing there.

Oh, a lion hunter in the jungle dark, And a sleeping drunkard up in central park, and a Chinese dentist and a British queen All fit together in the same machine. Nice, nice, such very different people in the same device!