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All Quotes by author - Kurt Vonnegut

" About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm. "

" A chaplain's assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the American Army. "

" Actually, to be an effective person politically in this country, I think you have to be thirty or over, and also you have to be rich, well-placed, you have to be close to power. And I don't think that young people, because they look young, can do much, as I think they are counterproductive. "

" All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. "

" All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment. "

" Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be. "

" Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae. "

" Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn. "

" As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs. "

" Back in my days as a chemistry student, I used to be quite a technocrat. I was firmly convinced that scientists would have cornered God and photographed Him in color by 1951. "

" Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. "

" Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John. "

" During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school. "

" Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them. "

" Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milky Way - with a century of transportation whoopee. "

" Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why. "

" Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia. "

" I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It's as though I had taken over the family Esso station. "

" I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife. "

" I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep. "

" I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read 'Democracy in America' by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government. "

" I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest. "

" If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy. "

" If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so. "

" If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own. "

" If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind. "

" I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours. "

" I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers. "

" I have no degree in biochemistry, neither do I have one in mechanical engineering, as the Army saw fit to terminate both courses before they were finished. "

" I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see. "

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