1,579 Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

There were lots of things to stop and see - and then it was time to go, always time to go.

I have no doubt that they'll tell you a lot of kind things about me when my back is turned. They may not have been behind the door when God passed out the pretty faces, but Heaven only knows where they were when He divided up the gratitude.

A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would be two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is just dead machinery.

You can’t write novels without a touch of paranoia. I’m paranoid as an act of good citizenship, concerned about what the powerful people are up to.

When things go well for days on end, it is an hilarious accident.

FËDOR Mikhailovich Dostoevski, theRussian novelist, said one time that, "One sacred memory from childhood is perhaps the best education." I can think of another quickie education for a child, which, in its way, is almost as salutary: Meeting a human being who is tremendously respected by the adult world, and realizing that that person is actually a malicious lunatic.

Every so often, in the midst of chaos, you come across an amazing, inexplicable instance of civic responsibility. Maybe the last shred of faith people have is in their firemen.

Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.

I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian]