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"Sons of suicides seldom do well. Characteristically, they find life lacking a certain zing. They tend to feel more rootless than most, even in a notoriously rootless nation. They are squeamishly incurious about the past and numbly certain about the future to this grisly extent: they suspect that they, too, will kill themselves."
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"Shame lies. All the time. About everything. Don't believe your shame."
"I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums."
"Nothing will ever be solved if we wallow in the darkness of denial."
"Her mind is an unquiet one, words and thoughts and impulses constantly crashing into each other."
"[If a man] postpone[s] any open acknowledgement... that his own faith is in direct opposition to the assumptions on which all the conversation of his new friends [are] based... he will be in a false position. He will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent. He will assume, at first only by his manner, but presently by his words, all sorts of cynical and sceptical attitudes which are not really his. But... they may become his. All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be."
"I was living for one thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling."
"People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt... They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear."
"Human brain is structured to avoid any kind of refutation of one's religious beliefs."
"We are what we believe we are."
"Man is more likely to believe an opinion that he wanted to hear - than a fact that he wishes was an opinion."
Explore more quotes by Kurt Vonnegut
"Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth."You don't seem to agree."I don't know whether I agree or not. I just have trouble understandinghow truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person."
"After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?"
"This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed."
"Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer."
"And I am now compelled to wonder if wisdom has ever existed or can ever exist. Might wisdom be as impossible in this particular universe as a perpetual-motion machine?"
"The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought."
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