During his 50-year writing career, Vonnegut published fourteen novels, five plays, five non-fiction essays and three short story collections. His most famous book is Slaughterhouse-Five, a satirical novel that draws from World War II experiences and argues the refrain “So it goes” to death and mortality.
Vonnegut was a powerful spokesman and writer whose work accurately reflects the societal problems in the modern age. His last collection of essays A Man Without a Country presents corporate greed, overpopulation and war as the three problems that would eventually end humanity. When people ridiculed his claims, he responded saying, “We could have saved the world, but we were just too damned lazy.”
In honor of Kurt Vonnegut’s 93rd birthday, we wanted to pay tribute by publishing a few of his most notable quotes. Enjoy!
On the Arts:
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.
On Community:
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
On Humanity:
This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.
On Awareness:
Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.
On Sad Truths:
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
On Believing In Yourself:
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.
On Love:
There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.
On Freedom of Speech:
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
On Living Your True Self:
We must be careful about what we pretend to be.
On Knowledge:
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
On Ephemeral Nature:
So it goes.
