Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Confucius does his crossword with a pen.

Where the lion's skin will not reach, you must patch it out with the fox's.

We have to adapt and overcome, that's all we can do.

My architecture is the architecture of survival.

I am a thief of knowledge, and in a survival way, I had to solve all the problems around me.

To survive, you've got to keep wheedling your way. You can't just sit there and fight against odds when it's not going to work. You have to turn a corner, dig a hole, go through a tunnel - and find a way to keep moving.

In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused by nature or the universe or technology, what readers want to see is how people cope, and so the character are present to cope, or fail to cope.

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.

The basic ability to not wipe oneself out, to endure, to use your technological interaction with the world in such a way that has the possibility of the likelihood of lasting and not being temporary - that seems like a pretty good definition of intelligence.

Pete and Repeat are in a boat, Pete jumps out who's left in the boat?

make away out of no way

when times are tough, the weak bail and the tough get creative.

I think that everybody does hustle in order to survive. That doesn't mean lying - it's more about how you handle situations.

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

Necessity--thou best of peacemakers, As well as surest prompter of invention.

I travel with a boom box. When I get on a plane, I stuff the power cord for the boom box into the battery compartment. From an outsider's point of view, it looks like I've got it all wrong.

It has been said that an engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound; if that be so, we were certainly engineers.

Sheer necessity,-the proper parent of an art so nearly allied to invention.

Life was not fair. If you wanted something you had to take it. Before someone else took it from you. Neatly dissected down to its essence, life was one long series of lily pad hoppings. The quick and the resourceful were able to adapt and survive; all others were simply crushed as a more nimble creature landed on the lily pad they had occupied for too long.

Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.

Cut off my head, and singular I am, Cut off my tail, and plural I appear; Although my middle's left, there's nothing there! What is my head cut off? A sounding sea; What is my tail cut off? A rushing river; And in their mingling depths I fearless play, Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.

Through eons of living in a land so poor there was little to eat but oats, they had as usual converted necessity into a virtue, and insisted that they liked the stuff.

Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to cycle and he will realize fishing is stupid and boring.

When I haven't any blue I use red.

When life gives you lemons, you exchange them at the store for something more edible.