1,579 Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.... It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.

You're learning that you do not inhabit a solid, reliable social structure - that the older people around you are worried, moody, goofy human beings who themselves were little kids only a few days ago.

As for children's working off aggressions, I'm against it. They are going to need all the aggressions they can contain for ultimate release in the adult world. Name one great man in history who did not go boiling and bubbling through childhood with a lashed-down safety valve.

How-how do you do?" I asked. My heart was pounding. Blood boiled in my ears."It is not possible to make a mistake," she assured me. I did not know this was a customary greeting given by all Bokonists when meeting a shy person. So, I responded with a feverish discussion of whether it was possible to make a mistake or not."My God, you have no idea how many mistakes I've already made. You're looking at the world's champion mistakemaker.

That's what is was to be young — to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

People are hated a lot of places. Claire pointed out in her letter that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty.

Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.

And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. (“How to Write with Style”. Essay, 1985)