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"All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true."
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"The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think they are... All men die, and most men miserably. That two soldiers on opposite sides, each believing his own country to be in the right, each at the moment when his selfishness is most in abeyance and his will to sacrifice in the ascendant, should kill [each] other in plain battle seems to me by no means one of the most terrible things in this terrible world."

"It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed -- not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered."

"What branch do you want to go in? "I don' give a god-damn, said Pilon jauntily. "I guess we need men like you in the infantry. And Pilon was written so. He turned then to Big Joe, and the Portagee was getting sober. "Where do you want to go? "I want to go home, Big Joe said miserably. The sergeant put him in the infantry too."

"The evil we create during the wars to save us, it can also end us when the war is over."

"Man lives by habits indeed but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement."
Explore more quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

"When a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moment, past, present, future, always have existed, always will exist."

"What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain."

"What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death."

"Jesus--if Kilgore Trout could only write!" Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good."

"That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?''Yes' Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.'Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."

"It pains me even now, even a million years later, to write about such human misbehaviour.A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That's all I can say."

"Things stayed peaceful in there, even as the crashing vehicles and the cries of the injured and dying reached a crescendo outside. "I fry mine in butter!" indeed."
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