Kurt Vonnegut Jr quotes

" We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. " # Appearance

" Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. " # Character # Flaws # Growth

" We are what we imagine ourselves to be. " # Imagination

" We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap. " # World

" There's only one me, and I'm stuck with him. " # Self-love # Love # Action

" The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth. " # Army and Navy # Music # Example

" Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before, Bokonon tells us. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way. " # Caution # Murder # Learning

" Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we've got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that's why you ought to be glad you're an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they're doing. " # America # Freedom # Power

" Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people. " # Illusion # Books - Reading # Cinema

" I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival. " # Intelligence and Intellectuals # Evolution # Poverty and The Poor