Kurt Vonnegut Quotes on Work
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'Strange business,' said Lasher. 'This crusading spirit of the managers and engineers, the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy war: all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days, which it certainly wasn't in the beginning. Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday's snow job becomes today's sermon.'
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In order to get what we've got, Anita, we have, in effect, traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them - the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect.
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Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.
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The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody.
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Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.
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Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.
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Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
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You were sick, but now you're well, and there's work to do.
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A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.
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The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.