"You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff. You're not expecting it."

Kurt Vonnegut Literature See all quotes by Kurt Vonnegut →

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More by Kurt Vonnegut

“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, we … dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class. Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything. Piece of cake.”

“Well, I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president.”

“I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can't help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That’s why we’ve got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.”

“The new heroism — put a village idiot into a pressure cooker, seal it up tight, and shoot him at the moon.”

“Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Since there is no such thing as absolute rightness and truth, we always pursue the artificial, leading, human truth. We judge and make a truth that excludes other truths. Art plays a formative part in…"

— Gerhard Richter

Art1932

#truth

"Among the major tasks before us none is of greater importance for our strength and stability than the task of building up the unity and solidarity of our people. Our country has often stood as a solid…"

— Lal Bahadur Shastri

Politics1904–1966

#power

"The hangover theory, then, turns out to be intellectually incoherent; nobody has managed to explain why bad investments in the past require the unemployment of good workers in the present. Yet the the…"

— Paul Krugman

Economics1953

#time

"Find out what really fascinates you and follow that. Almost anything in nature, if you follow it, you will find a scientific problem. That is a better way to do it than following fads, because what is…"

— Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Science1952

#science