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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

"Oh, Mr. Trout," nice Milo went on, there in Trout's suite, "teach us to sing and dance and laugh and cry. We've tried to survive so long on money and sex and envy and real estate and football and basketball and automobiles and television and alcohol—on sawdust and broken glass!” (1973)

Excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, “Breakfast of Champions” (1973):

"Oh, Mr. Trout," nice Milo went on, there in Trout's suite,
"teach us to sing and dance and laugh and cry. We've tried to survive so long on money and sex and envy and real estate and football and basketball and automobiles and television and alcohol—on sawdust and broken glass!"
"Open your eyes!" said Trout bitterly. "Do I look like a dancer, a singer, a man of joy!" He was wearing his tuxedo now. It was a size too large for him. He had lost much weight since high school. His pockets were crammed with mothballs.
They bulged like saddlebags.
"Open your eyes!" said Trout. "Would a man nourished by beauty look like this! You have nothing but desolation and desperation here, you say! I bring you more of the same!"
"My eyes are open," said Milo warmly, "and I see exactly what I expect to see. I see a man who is terribly wounded—be-cause he has dared to pass through the fires of truth to the other side, which we have never seen. And then he has come back again—to tell us about the other side."

031

Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

“[D]uring the six months of blockade threatened by the authorities, they would make the ruins a laboratory, a demonstration of how well and happily men could live with virtually no machines. They saw now the common man's wisdom in wrecking practically everything.“ Player Piano (1952)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

”[T]hey even had to explain to Unk that there was a radio antenna under the crown of his skull, and that it would hurt him whenever he did something a good soldier wouldn't ever do. […] The pain was horrible. Unk was bound to admit that a soldier would be crazy not to do his duty at all times.” …

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

. . . “I didn't say so back then, but I am perfectly happy to say now that the trouble with the Ruling Class was that too many of its members were nitwits like Kimberley.” . . . Hocus Pocus (1990)

Excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Hocus Pocus“ (1990):

“I had spotted Kimberley as a snoop, all right, but not as a walking recording studio. All through the academic year now ending, our paths had crossed with puzzling frequency. Again and again I would be talking to somebody, almost anywhere on the campus, and realize that Kimberley was lurking close by. I assumed that she was slightly cracked, and was eavesdropping on everyone, avid for gossip. She wasn't even taking a course of mine for credit, although she did audit both Physics for Non-scientists and Music Appreciation for Nonmusicians. So what could I possibly be to her or she to me? We had never had a conversation about anything.
One time, I remember, I was shooting pool in the new recreation center, the Pahlavi Pavilion, and she was so close that I was having trouble working my cuestick, and I said to her, "Do you like my perfume?"
"What?" she said.
"I find you so close to me so often," I said, "I thought maybe you liked my perfume. Im very flattered, if that's the case, because that's nothing but my natural body odor. I don't use perfume."
. . .
I was playing 8-ball head to head with the novelist Paul Slazinger, that year's Writer in Residence. He was dead broke and out of print, which is the only reason anybody ever became Writer in Residence at Tarkington. He was so old that he had actually been in World War II. He had won a Silver Star like me when I was only 3 years old!
He asked me who Kimberley was, and I said, and she got this on tape, too, "Pay no attention. She's just another member of the Ruling Class."
So the Board of Trustees would want to know what it was, exactly, that I had against the Ruling Class.
I didn't say so back then, but I am perfectly happy to say now that the trouble with the Ruling Class was that too many of its members were nitwits like Kimberley.”

. . . “She accused me of saying that all rich people were drunks and lunatics. This was a garbling of Grandfather's saying that Capitalism was what the people with all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decided to do today. So I straightened that out, and explained that the opinion was my grandfather's, not my own.
"I heard your speech was worse than Mr. Slazinger's," she said.
"I certainly hope not," I said. "I was trying to show how outdated my grandfather's opinions were. I wanted people to laugh. They did."
"I heard you said Jesus Christ was un-American," she said, her tape recorder running all the time.
So I unscrambled that one for her. The original had been another of Grandfather's sayings. He repeated Karl Marx's prescription for an ideal society, "From cach according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." And then he asked me, meaning it to be a wry joke, "What could be more un-American, Gene, than sounding like the Sermon on the Mount!"
"What about putting all the Jews in a concentration camp in Idaho?" said Kimberley.
"What about what-what-what?" I asked in bewilderment. At last, at last, and too late, too late, I understood that this stupid girl was as dangerous as a cobra. It would be catastrophic if she spread the word that I was an anti-Semite, especially with so many Jews, having interbred with Gentiles, now sending their children to Tarkington.
"In all my life, I never said anything like that," I promised.
. . .
"Jews," she said.
"That was my grandfather again," I said.
"He hated Jews, right?" she said.
"No, no, no," I said. "He admired a lot of them."
"But he still wanted to put them in concentration camps," she said. "Right?"
The origin of this most poisonous misunderstanding was in my account in Chapel of riding around with Grandfather in his car one Sunday morning in Midland City, Ohio, when I was a little boy. He, not I, was mocking all organized religions.”

. . .
“What he said about Jews that morning was actually another kidding of Christianity. He had to explain to me, as I would have to explain to Kimberley, that the Bible consisted of 2 separate works, the New Testament and the Old Testament.

"I pity the Jews," said Grandfather, "trying to get through life with only half a Bible."
And then he added, "That's like trying to get from here to San Francisco with a road map that stops at Dubuque, Iowa."
. . .
I was angry now. "Kimberley," I asked, "did you by any chance tell the Board of Trustees that I said these things? Is that what they want to see me about?"

"Maybe," she said. She was acting cute. I thought this was a dumb answer. It was in fact accurate. The Trustees had a lot more they wanted to discuss than misrepresentations of my Chapel lecture.

I found her both repulsive and pitiful. She thought she was such a heroine and I was such a viper! Now that I had caught on to what she had been up to, she was thrilled to show me that she was proud and unafraid.
. . .
I didn't know yet that her Rhodes Scholar father, a Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton, had put her up to this. I thought she had noted her father's conviction, often expressed in his columns and on his TV show, and no doubt at home, that a few teachers who secretly hated their country were making young people lose faith in its future and leadership.
. . .
When it comes right down to it, that is why they fired me, although I don't believe they themselves realized that that was why they fired me: I had ugly, personal knowledge of the disgrace that was the Vietnam War.
None of the Trustees had been in that war, and neither had Kimberley's father, and not one of them had allowed a son or a daughter to be sent over there. Across the lake in the prison, of course, and down in the town, there were plenty of somebody's sons who had been sent over there.”

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

“. . . [I]sn't it war and military matters we're all trying to get rid of? . . . Why, you could figure out what each country needs to make the most of its resources, and I could give it to them without costing American taxpayers a penny. . ." Report on the Barnhouse Effect (1950)

Excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “REPORT ON THE BARNHOUSE EFFECT”:

. . . The professor appealed to Mr. Cuthrell. "Look," he pleaded, "isn't it war and military matters we're all trying to get rid of? Wouldn't it be a whole lot more significant and lots cheaper for me to try moving cloud masses into drought areas, and things like that? I admit I know next to nothing about international politics, but it seems reasonable to suppose that nobody would want to fight wars if there were enough of everything to go around. Mr. Cuthrell, I'd like to try running generators where there isn't any coal or water power, irrigating deserts, and so on. Why, you could figure out what each country needs to make the most of its resources, and I could give it to them without costing American taxpayers a penny."

"Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom," said the general heavily.

Mr. Cuthrell threw the general a look of mild distaste. "Un-fortunately, the general is right in his own way," he said. "I wish to heaven the world were ready for ideals like yours, but it simply isn't. We aren't surrounded by brothers, but by ene-mies. It isn't a lack of food or resources that has us on the brink of war—it's a struggle for power. Who's going to be in charge of the world, our kind of people or theirs?"

The professor nodded in reluctant agreement and arose from the table. "I beg your pardon, gentlemen. You are, after all, better qualified to judge what is best for the country. I'll do whatever you say." He turned to me. "Don't forget to wind the restricted clock and put the confidential cat out," he said gloomily, and ascended the stairs to his bedroom.
. . .

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

"What's flense?" "It's what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board. They would strip off the skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I do that in my head to people—get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them." Bluebeard

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

“He plainly expected puffed-up critics to sweat bullets and excrete sizable chunks of masonry when trying to answer his cunningly innocent question: ‘Art or not?’” /…/ "Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not for their pictureness." Timequake (1997)

Excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Timequake” (1997).

Chapter 43

Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop?
Answer: That is bird poop, too.

SO MUCH FOR SCIENCE, and how helpful it can be in thes
times ot environmental calamities. Chernobvi is still hotte than a Hiroshima baby carriage. Our underarm deodorants
have eaten holes in the ozone layer.
And just get a load of this: My big brother Bernie, who can't draw for sour apples, and who at his most objectionable used to say he didn't like paintings because they didn't do anything, just hung there year after year, has this summer become an artist!
I shit you not! This Ph.D. physical chemist from MIT is now the
Art or not?
poor man's Jackson Pollock! He squoozles glurp of various colors
and consistencies between two flat sheets of impermeable mate-rials, such as windowpanes or bathroom tiles. He pulls them apart, et voilà! This has nothing to do with his cancer. He didn't know he had it yet, and the malignancy was in his lungs and not his brain in any case. He was just farting around one day, a semi-retired old geezer without a wife to ask him what in the name of God he thought he was doing, et voilà! Better late than never, that's all I can say.
So he sent me some black-and-white Xeroxes of his squiggly miniatures, mostly dendritic forms, maybe trees or shrubs, maybe mushrooms or umbrellas full of holes, but really quite interesting. Like my ballroom dancing, they were acceptable. He has since sent me multi-colored originals, which I like a lot.
The message he sent me along with the Xeroxes, though, wasn't about unexpected happiness. It was an unreconstructed

…Bernie said, too, that a very interesting scientifc phenomenon was involved, having to do, he left me to guess, with how different glurps behave when squoozled this way and that, with nowhere to go but up or down or sideways. If the artsy-fartsy world had no use for his pictures, he seemed to imply, his pictures could still point the way to better lubricants or suntan lotions, or who knows what? The all-new Preparation H!
He would not sign his pictures, he said, or admit publicly that he had made them, or describe how they were made. He plainly expected puffed-up critics to sweat bullets and excrete sizable chunks of masonry when trying to answer his cunningly innocent question: "Art or not!"
I was pleased to reply with an epistle which was frankly. vengeful, since he and Father had screwed me out of a liberal arts college education: "Dear Brother: This is almost like telling you about the birds and the bees," I began. "There are many good people who are beneficially stimulated by some, but not all, manmade arrangements of colors and shapes on flat surfaces, essentially nonsense.
"You yourself are gratified by some music, arrangements of noises, and again essentially nonsense. If I were to kick a bucket down the cellar stairs, and then say to you that the racket I had made was philosophically on a par with The Magic Flute, this would not be the beginning of a long and upsetting debate. An utterly satisfactory and complete response on your part would be, 'I like what Mozart did, and I hate what the bucket did.'
"Contemplating a purported work of art is a social activity
Either you have a rewarding time, or you don't. You don't have to say why afterward. You don't have to say anything.
"You are a justly revered experimentalist, dear Brother. If you really want to know whether your pictures are, as you say, 'art

or not, you must display them in a public place somewhere, and see if strangers like to look at them. That is the way the game is played. Let me know what happens."
I went on: "People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowing something about the artist. Again, the situation is social rather than scientific.
Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for religiosity, for suf-fering, for concupiscence, for rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes!
"There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. We can even surmise quite a bit about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caverns underneath Lascaux, France.
"I dare to suggest that no picture can attract serious attention without a particular sort of human being attached to it in the viewer's mind. If you are unwilling to claim credit for your pictures, and to say why you hoped others might find them worth examining, there goes the ball game.
"Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not for their pictureness."
I went on: "There is also the matter of craftsmanship. Real picture-lovers like to play along, so to speak, to look closely at the surfaces, to see how the illusion was created. If you are unwilling to say how you made your pictures, there goes the ball game a second time.
"Good luck, and love as always," I wrote. And I signed my name.

020

Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

“Your awareness ... is a new quality in the Universe, which exists only because there are human beings. Physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the Cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is *human awareness*.” Timequake

Excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, “Timequake”:

But I now ask you to look precisely at one, and then precisely at the other."
"OK," I said, "I did it."
"It took a second, do you think'" he said.
"No more," I said.
"Even if you'd taken an hour," he said, "something would have passed between where those two heavenly bodies used light, at, conservatively speaking, a million times the speed of
"What was it?" I said.
"Your awareness," he said. "That is a new quality in the Universe, which exists only because there are human beings.
Physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the Cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is human awareness." Trout paused, ensuring with the ball of his left thumb that his upper dental plate would not slip when he said his last words to us that enchanted evening.
All was well with his teeth. This was his finale: "I have thought of a better word than awareness," he said. "Let us call it soul." He paused.
"Ting-a-ling:" he said.

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

‘You think the ancient Romans were smart? Look at how dumb their numbers were. One theory of why they declined and fell is that their plumbing was lead. The root of our word plumbing is plumbum, the Latin word for "lead." Lead poisoning makes people stupid and lazy. What's *your* excuse?’ Timequake

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

“If harmless objects like those rectangles of stretched canvas were hobgoblins to me, could fill me with shame, yes, with rage at a world which had entrapped me into being a failure and a laughingstock and so on, then I *wasn't* a grown-up yet, although I was then 68 years old.” Bluebeard (1987)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

“Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. It's that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.” Mother Night (1961)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

“No Trespassing! This Means You!” Breakfast of Champions (1973)

NO TRESPASSING!
THIS MEANS YOU!
• ••
Kilgore Trout once wrote a story called "This Means You." It was set in the Hawaiian Islands, the place where the lucky winners of Dwayne Hoover's contest in Midland City were supposed to go. Every bit of land on the islands was owned by only about forty people, and, in the story, Trout had those people decide to exercise their property rights to the full. They put up no trespassing signs on everything.
This created terrible problems for the million other people on the islands. The law of gravity required that they stick somewhere on the surface. Either that, or they could go out into the water and bob offshore.
But then the Federal Government came through with an emergency program. It gave a big balloon full of helium to every man, woman and child who didn't own property.
•••
There was a cable with a harness on it dangling from each balloon. With the help of the balloons, Hawaiians could go on inhabiting the islands without always sticking to things other people owned.

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

He pointed them out, counterclockwise. "House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle, 'Papa's' palace, and Fort Jesus." "Fort Jesus?" "The training camp for our soldiers." "It's named after Jesus Christ?" "Sure. Why not?" Cat’s Cradle (1963)

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Reposted by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

“If Jesus were alive today, we would kill him with lethal injection. I call that progress. We would have to kill him for the same reason he was killed the first time. His ideas are just too liberal.” Talk at Butler University (2007)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

". . . “Anyway, Thoreau was in jail because he wouldn't pay a tax to support the Mexican War. He didn't believe in the war. And Emerson came to jail to see him. 'Henry,' he said, 'why are you here?' And Thoreau said, 'Ralph, why *aren't* you here?’”. . .” Player Piano (1952)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Anticipating the invention of chat LLMs nearly 40 years before their commercial proliferation, Kurt Vonnegut gave us “Mandarax” in his 1985 novel, Galápagos.

"It has taken me an unforgivably long time to realize how much malice there is, how much contempt for others there is, in what you do."
"You, *Doctor Hiroguchi," she went on, "think that everybody but yourself is just taking up space on this planet, and we make too much noise and waste valuable natural resources and have too many children and leave garbage around. So it would be a much nicer place if the few stupid services we are able to perform for the likes of you were taken over by machinery. That wonderful Mandarax you're scratching your ear with now: what is that but an excuse for a mean-spirited egomaniac never to pay or even thank any human being with a knowledge of languages or mathematics or history or medicine or literature or ikebana or anything?"

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

“It had eight new French fighter-bombers and each of these planes, moreover, was equipped with an American air-to-ground missile with a Japanese brain which could home in on radar signals, or on heat from an engine, depending on instructions from the pilot.“ Galápagos (1985) 1/4

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

“I was impressed. I realized that nations could never acknowledge their own wars as tragedies, but that families not only could but had to. Bully for them!” Slapstick (1976) 6/6

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 19/10/2025

“But then, just when everything was going so well — when Americans were happier than they had ever been, even though the country was bankrupt and falling apart — people began to die by the millions. . . And that was the end of the Nation. It became families, and nothing more.” Slapstick (1974) 1/5

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

“[He] described the incredible artificial weather that Earthlings sometimes create for other Earthlings when they don't want those other Earthlings to inhabit Earth any more. Shells were bursting in the treetops with terrific bangs, he said, showering down knives and needles and razorblades.” (S5)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

“She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.” Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

“I find myself thinking even now that the story of Sacco and Vanzetti may yet enter the bones of future generations. Perhaps it needs to be told only a few more times. . .” Jailbird (1979) (1/9)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

"’I should want to go to jail?’ said Paul, trying to get some sort of message for himself out of the anecdote. ‘You shouldn't let fear of jail keep you from doing what you believe in.’”

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

“The only Martian military success was the capture of a meat market in Basel, Switzerland, by seventeen Parachute Ski Marines. Everywhere else the Martians were butchered promptly, before they could even dig in. As much butchering was done by amateurs as by professionals.” 1/

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

“He was laughing at the ferocious mess he was in—at the way he had pretended all his army life that he had understood everything that was going on, and that everything that was going on was just fine. He was laughing at the dumb way he had let himself be used—by God knows who for God knows what.” 1/

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

“I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ‘science fiction’ ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal. The way a person gets into this drawer, apparently, is to notice technology.” Science Fiction (1974)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

“Midland City has now been depopulated by a neutron bomb explosion. It might have been a bigger story, a signal for the start of World War Three, if the Government hadn't acknowledged at once that the bomb was made in America. One newscast I heard called it *a friendly bomb.*. . .” (1/5)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

"’That's worse. You're a Fascist, Wilbur. That's what you are.’ ‘That's absurd,’ I said. ‘Fascists are inferior people who believe it when somebody tells them they're superior,’ she said. ‘Now, now—‘ I said. ‘Then they want everybody else to die,’ she said.” Slapstick (1976)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

“He predicted, I remember, that human slavery would come back, that it had in fact never gone away. He said that so many people wanted to come here because it was so easy to rob the poor people, who got absolutely no protection from the Government. . .” (1/4)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

“[S]imply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work . . .” Bluebeard (1987)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

“Another thing the Elders liked about Earthlings was that they feared and hated other Earthlings who did not look and talk exactly as they did. They made life a hell for each other as wellas for what they called ‘lower animals.’ They actually thought of strangers as lower animals.“ 1/2

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

“If I'd wasted time creating characters, I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter: irresistible forces in nature, and cruel inventions, and cockamamie ideals and governments and economies that make heroes and heroines feel like something the cat drug in.”1/2

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 28/09/2025

“[1970] gave me a job in the Nixon White House. [1975] sent me to prison for my own preposterous contributions to the American political scandals known collectively as *Watergate*. Three years ago, as I write, [1977] was about to turn me loose again. I felt like a piece of garbage.” Jailbird (1979)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 28/09/2025

"It's all right," she said. "You couldn't help it that you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed—so you were a good man just the same." Jailbird (1979)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

“The novel was about the end of the world in the year 2000. It told of how mad scientists made a terrific bomb that wiped out the whole world. There was a big sex orgy when everybody knew that the world was going to end, and then Jesus Christ Himself appeared ten seconds before the bomb went off.”

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

“There was a small riot going on in the park adjacent to the United Nations, only three blocks away. Out-of-work white youths armed with baseball bats were braining men they thought were homosexuals. They threw one of them into the East River, who turned out to be the finance minister of Sri Lanka.”

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

“How could he amount to anything if he did not use loaded dice? How has he used loaded dice with you? The laws that say he can fire anybody who stands up for the rights of workers—those are loaded dice. The policemen who protect his property rights but not your human rights—those are loaded dice."

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

“On this particular planet, where money mattered more than anything, the nicest person imaginable might suddenly get the idea of wringing her neck so that their loved ones might live in comfort. It would be the work of the moment— and easily forgotten as the years went by. Time flies.” Jailbird ‘79

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Reposted by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

“. . .‘At least we still have freedom of speech,’ I said. And she said, ‘That isn't something somebody else gives you. That's something you have to give yourself.’” Hocus Pocus (1990)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

“My idealism did not die even in the Nixon White House, did not die even in prison, did not die even when I became, my most recent employment, a vice-president of the Records Division of RAMJAC Corporation. I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.”

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

"There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia." The Sirens of Titan (1959)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

“I call that being a teacher. I don't call that being a mastermind of a treasonous enterprise. All I ever wanted to overthrow was ignorance and self-serving fantasies.” Hocus Pocus (1990)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

The man who got me fired was Jason Wilder, the celebrated Conservative newspaper columnist, lecturer, and television talk show host . . . Wilder had promised to denounce the college in his column and on his TV show if the Trustees did not fire me. So they dared not come to my assistance. HP (1990)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

"We cannot get rid of mankind's fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true. "I give you a holy word: DISARM." Deadeye Dick (1982)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

"The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings," said Paul, "not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems." Player Piano (1952)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

“The therapist, after a deeply upsetting investigation of normality at this time and place, was bound to conclude that a normal person, functioning well on the upper levels of a prosperous, industrialized society, can hardly hear his conscience at all.” God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

“He coined a new word for Sylvia's disease, ‘Samaritrophia,’ which he said meant, ‘hysterical indifference to the troubles of those less fortunate than oneself.’ . . .” God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

“Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti.” Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

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Kurt Vonnegut @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

“. . . its success in keeping the common people reasonably happy and proud depended on the strength of the people themselves— and yet it described no practical machinery which would tend to make the people, as opposed to their elected representatives, strong. . .” Slapstick (1976)

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