Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we've got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that's why you ought to be glad you're an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they're doing. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - America)

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - Appearance)

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - Army and Navy)

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. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - Astrology)

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before, Bokonon tells us. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - Caution)

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - Character)

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - Illusion)

We are what we imagine ourselves to be. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - Imagination)

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - Intelligence and Intellectuals)

If somebody says, I love you, to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires? I love you, too. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - Love)

Thinking doesn't seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - Mind)

We are all what we pretend to be, but, we had better be very careful what we pretend. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - People)

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - Politicians and Politics)

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled Science Fiction and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - Science Fiction)

There's only one me, and I'm stuck with him. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - Self-love)

It was a thunderingly beautiful experience -- voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - Space)

We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. Only in superstition is there hope. If you want to become a friend of civilization, then become an enemy of the truth and a fanatic for harmless balderdash. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - Superstition)

What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - War)

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap. - (Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - World)