1,579 Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

In the water I am beautiful.

Writers can treat their mental illnesses every day.

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round & wet & crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-God damn it, you've got to be kind.

What we will be seeking ... for the rest of our lives will be large, stable communities of like-minded people, which is to say relatives. They no longer exist. The lack of them is not only the main cause, but probably the only cause of our shapeless discontent in the midst of such prosperity.

Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass.

Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism Iraq in cynical money-making. And there's no optimism or idealism now -- Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. We're proud of being ignorant that leaves virtue at our core. We aren't frazzled by knowledge like foreigners, so we can be trusted.

People say there are no atheists in foxholes. A lot of people think this is a good argument against atheism. Personally, I think it's a much better argument against foxholes.

Two radical ideas have been introduced into human thought. One of them is that energy and matter are pretty much the same sort of stuff. That's Einstein. The other is that revenge is a bad idea. Revenge is an enormously popular idea but, of course, Jesus came along with the radical idea of forgiveness. If you're insulted, you have to square accounts. So this invention by Jesus is as radical as Einstein's.