21 Kurt Vonnegut Quotes on History

Kurt Vonnegut quotes on history

12. I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy - because we're experienced with it, you know. And, in democracy, after a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go. And, after a hundred and fifty years, you have to let your women vote. And, at the beginning of democracy, is that quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite okay. And that's what's going on now.

18. The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected.

67. Maybe God has let everybody who ever lived be reborn - so he or she can see how it ends. Even Pitecanthropus erectus and Australopithecus and Sinanthropus pekensis and the Neanderthalers are back on Earth - to see how it ends. They're all on Times Square - making change for peepshows. Or recruiting Marines.

82. I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not. So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things. What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance. And all music is.

85. Teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

116. History is merely a list of surprises. ... It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again. Please write that down.

123. 'That was the strength of the Nazis,' she said. 'They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make him stay away.'

135. I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

146. The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.

153. I asked Rob Roy where he had gone to college. 'Yale,' he said. I told him what Helen Dole said about Yale, that it ought to be called 'Plantation Owners' Tech.' 'I don't get it,' he said. 'I had to ask her to explain it myself,' I said. 'She said Yale was where plantation owners learned how to get the natives to kill each other instead of them.'

157. During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.

172. His plan? To pass out weapons to slaves, so they could overthrow their masters. Suicide.

173. I was lucky enough on this trip to interview none other than the late Adolf Hitler. I was gratified to learn that he now feels remorse for any actions of his, however indirectly, which might have had anything to do with the violent deaths suffered by thirty-five million people during World War II. He and his mistress Eva Braun, of course were among those casualties, along with four million other Germans, six million Jews, eighteen million citizens of the Soviet Union and so on. 'I paid my dues with everyone else,' he said. It is his hope that a modest monument, possibly a stone cross, since he was a Christian, will be erected somewhere in his memory, possibly on the grounds of the United Nations Headquarters in New York. It should be incised, he said, with his name and dates 1889-1945. Underneath should be a two-word sentence in German: 'Entschuldigen Sie.' Roughly translated into English, this comes out, 'I beg your pardon,' or 'Excuse Me.'

174. During my controlled near-death experiences, I've met Sir Isaac Newton, who died back in 1727 as often as I've met Saint Peter. They both hang out at the Heaven end of the blue tunnel of the Afterlife. Saint Peter is there because it's his job. Sir Isaac is there because of his insatiable curiosity about what the blue tunnel is, how the blue tunnel works. It isn't enough for Newton that during his eighty-five years on Earth he invented calculus, codified and quantified the laws of gravity, motion and optics, and designed the first reflecting telescope. He can't forgive himself for having left it to Darwin to come up with the theory of evolution, to Pasteur to come up with the germ theory, and to Albert Einstein to come up with relativity. 'I must have been deaf, dumb, and blind not to have come up with those myself,' he said to me. 'What could have been more obvious?'

179. What does 'A.D.' signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that. Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person?

200. Is it possible that seemingly incredible geniuses like Bach and Shakespeare and Einstein were not in fact superhuman, but simply plagiarists, copying great stuff from the future?

206. I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

207. Socialism is no more an evil word than Christianity. Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.

223. Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals.

224. It is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln. He always steals the show.

238. Future generations will look back on TV as the lead in the water pipes that slowly drove the Romans mad.