Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.

Please look at the imperfect human being God gave to love you once, and try to like me a little for what I really was, or, God willing, am. Then please, darling, become an imperfect human being among imperfect human beings again.""Jenny

That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old time big brains. They would tell their owners, in effect, 'Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course, it's just fun to think about.'And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it-have slaves fight each other to the death in the Colosseum, or burn people to death in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in indistrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on.

Another woman told Constant what it was the crowd felt it had a right to. 'We have a right to know what's going on!' she cried.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale."George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot . . .PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose! . . .So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occup

The human race is a scummy thing, and so is Earth, and so are you.

To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That__ all right. I like to have my heart broken.

I have had some experiences with love, or think I have, anyway, although the ones I have liked best could easily be described as "common decency". I treated somebody well for a little while, or even for a tremendously long time, and that person treated me well in return. Love need not have anything to do with it. (...)Love is where you find it. I think it is foolosh to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, "Please - a little less love, and a little more common decency".

My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.

You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too. And you've got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.

Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth.___ou don__ seem to agree.___ don__ know whether I agree or not. I just have trouble understandinghow truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.

Whenever my children complain about the planet to me, I say 'Shut up, I just got here myself'.

Vanity rather than wisdom determines how the world is run.

...we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE

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.

It's embarrassing to be human.

It__ all I__e seen, all I__e been through,_ I said, __hat makes it damn nearly impossible for me to say anything. I__e lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind.