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America
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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.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Appearance
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We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Astrology
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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.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Caution
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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.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Character
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Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Communication
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People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
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Conformity & Nonconformity
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There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
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Faith
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... this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me! Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!
-Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
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Illusion
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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.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Individuality
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I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Intelligence
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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.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Knowledge
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New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions, May, 1973
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Laughter
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Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Love
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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.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Military, the
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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.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Mind, the
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Thinking doesn't seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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People
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We are all what we pretend to be, but, we had better be very careful what we pretend.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Politics
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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.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Pretending
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Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
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Racism
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There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to have without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
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Science Fiction
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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.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Self-love
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There's only one me, and I'm stuck with him.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Space
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It was a thunderingly beautiful experience -- voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Superstition
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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.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Travel
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Unusual travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Books by and about Kurt Vonnegut