Quotes from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“You're the man who stands on the street corner with a roll of toilet paper, and written on each square are the words, 'I love you.' And each passer-by, no matter who, gets a square all his or her own. I don't want my square of toilet paper.'

I didn't realize it was toilet paper.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“I love you sons of bitches. You’re all I read any more. You're the only ones who’ll talk all about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstanding, mistakes, accidents, catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Pretend to be good always and even God will be fooled.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“I'm a painter in my dreams, you know.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Sons of suicides seldom do well.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Poverty is a relatively mild disease for even a very flimsy American soul, but uselessness will kill strong and weak souls alike, and kill every time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“What gets me most about these people, Daddy, isn't how ignorant they are, or how much they drink. It's the way they have of thinking that everything nice in the world is a gift to the poor people from them or their ancestors. The first afternoon I was here, Mrs. Buntline made me come out on the back porch and look at the sunset. So I did, and I said I liked it very much, but she kept waiting for me to say something else. I couldn't think of what I was supposed to say, so I said what seemed like a dumb thing. "Thank you very much," I said. That is exactly what she was waiting for. "You're entirely welcome," she said. I have since thanked her for the ocean, the moon, the stars in the sky, and the United States Constitution.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Eliot did to the word love what the Russians did to the word democracy. If Eliot is going to love everybody, no matter what they are, no matter what they do, then those of us who love particular people for particular reasons had better find ourselves a new word." He looked at an oil painting of his deceased wife. "For instance- I loved her more than I love our garbage collector, which makes me guilty of the most unspeakable of modern crimes: Dis-crim-i-nay-tion.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Samuel thundered that no American factory hand was worth more than eighty cents a day. And yet he could be thankful for the opportunity to pay a hundred thousand dollars or more for a painting by an Italian three centuries dead. And he capped this insult by giving paintings to museums for the spiritual elevation of the poor. The museums were closed on Sundays.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Is this some kind of joke?"

"That's for me to know and you to find out."

"Maybe you think it's funny to put up signs about people who want to commit suicide."

"Are you about to?"

"And what if I was?"

"I wouldn't tell you the gorgeous reasons I have discovered for going on living."

"What would you do?"

"I'd ask you to name the rock-bottom price you'd charge to go on living for just one more week.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Sons of suicides seldom do well. Characteristically, they find life lacking a certain zing. They tend to feel more rootless than most, even in a notoriously rootless nation. They are squeamishly incurious about the past and numbly certain about the future to this grisly extent: they suspect that they, too, will kill themselves.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“I think it's terrible the way people don't share things in this country. I think it's a heartless government that will let one baby be born owning a big piece of the country, the way I was born, and let another baby be born without owning anything. The least a government could do, it seems to me, is to divide things up fairly among the babies.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“You will last a lot longer, if you don't try to sing.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“In time, almost all men and women will become worthless as producers of goods, food, services, and more machines, as sources of practical ideas in the areas of economics, engineering, and probably medicine, too. So—if we can’t find reasons and methods for treasuring human beings because they are human beings, then we might as well, as has so often been suggested, rub them out.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“May I ask you a highly personal question?"

"It's what life does all the time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“The Money River, where the wealth of the nation flows. We were born on the banks of it-and so were most of the mediocre people we grew up with, went to private schools with, sailed and played tennis with. We can slurp from that mighty river to our hearts' content. And we can even take slurping lessons, so we can slurp more efficiently.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“He was a portly man, aslop in coffee and gravid with Danish pastry.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“every grotesquely rich American represents property, privileges, and pleasures that have been denied the many.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“I'd be grateful if you'd say anything, true or not, because I ran out of ideas...responsible or irresponsible, true or not, years ago. Stick your stainless steel spoon in this unhappy old man's brains Doctor...and stir.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

About the author

Popular quotes

“Are you mine?” I asked as I wiped my tears.
He kissed the corners of my mouth softly, and I felt heat rise up my neck. “Always have been,”
he whispered against my mouth.”
― Penelope Douglas, quote from Bully

“If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..."
469”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Wolf Hall

“It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Animal Dreams

“The human mind is only capable of absorbing a few things at a time. We see what is taking place in front of us in the here and now, and cannot envisage simultaneously a succession of processes, no matter how integrated and complementary. Our faculties of perception are consequently limited even as regards fairly simple phenomena. The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word. The symmetriad is a million—a billion, rather—raised to the power of N: it is incomprehensible. We pass through vast halls, each with a capacity of ten Kronecker units, and creep like so many ants clinging to the folds of breathing vaults and craning to watch the flight of soaring girders, opalescent in the glare of searchlights, and elastic domes which criss-cross and balance each other unerringly, the perfection of a moment, since everything here passes and fades. The essence of this architecture is movement synchronized towards a precise objective. We observe a fraction of the process, like hearing the vibration of a single string in an orchestra of supergiants. We know, but cannot grasp, that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands and millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint. It has been described as a symphony in geometry, but we lack the ears to hear it.”
― Stanisław Lem, quote from Solaris

“I have been made to protect you. Even in death, I will find a way.”
― Leigh Bardugo, quote from Crooked Kingdom

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.