1,579 Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

I think it’s important to live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy.

In Vietnam, though, I really was the mastermind. Yes, and that still bothers me. During my last year there, when my ammunition was language instead of bullets, I invented justifications for all the killing and dying we were doing which impressed even me! I was a genius of lethal hocus pocus.

I would have had him hanged from the yardarm, hick—if somebody hadn't stolen the, hick, yardarm, hick. At dawn, hick—if somebody hadn't stolen the dawn.

There was a big number over the door of the building. The number was five. Before the Americans could go inside, their only English-speaking guard told them to memorize their simple address, in case they got lost in the big city. Their address was this: 'Schlachthof-fünf.' Schlachthof means slaughterhouse. Fünf was good old five.

When I got home from my war, my uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he bellowed, 'You're a MAN now!'I damn near killed my first German.

Cigarettes are a classy way to commit suiside.

What is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?

The economy is a thoughtless weather system- and nothing more. Some joke on the people, to give them such a thing

That was what made them so hilarious and unafraid. That was the strength of the Nazis. [...] They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make Him stay away.