1,579 Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because the moment simply is.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.

It was a hideous discovery for the stranger to make—that a man at the end of his days was capable of inflicting pain as the rawest, loudest youth. With so little time left, the stranger added one more item to his long, long list of regrets.

This episode made me sorry to be alive, made me envy stones. I would rather have been a stone at the service of the Natural Order.

How do jokes work? The beginning of each good one challenges you to think... The second part of the joke announces that nobody wants you to think.

I wish you'd help me look into a more interesting problem - namely, my sanity.

This person has just arrived on this planet, knows nothing about it, has no standards by which to judge it. This person does not care what it becomes. It is eager to become absolutely anything it is supposed to be.

Maybe I did hurt him, but I don’t think I could have hurt him much. He was one of the best-protected human beings who ever lives. People couldn’t get at him because he just wasn’t interested in people.

People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn't own doodley-squat, so they couldn't improve their surroundings. So they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.The results had been catastrophic so far - suicide, theft, murder, and insanity and so on. But new chemicals were coming onto the market all the time.