Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

I know the power of going to Mount St. Helens, and to see that level of devastation is quite something - the power of tsunamis, etc. But it's human cruelty, the base level of humanity, that scares me most.

Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.

Humans are the absolute worst thing to happen to this planet.

But we moderns are impatient and destructive.

We have read with the deepest affliction, not unmixed with some surprise and much indignation, your detailed and anxious vindication of the most hideous crime that has ever stained humanity--the slavery of men of color in the United States of America. We are lost in utter amazement at the perversion of mind and depravity of heart which your address evinces. How can the generous, the charitable, the humane, the noble emotions of the Irish heart have become extinct amongst you? How can your nature be so totally changed as that you should become the apologists and advocates of that execrable system …. It was not in Ireland you learned this cruelty. Your mothers were gentle, kind, and humane. Their bosoms overflowed with the honey of human charity. Your sisters are, probably, many of them, still amongst us, and participate in all that is good and benevolent in sentiment and action. How, then, can you have become so depraved? How can your souls have become stained with a darkness blacker than the negro's skin?

I think us humans are just so cruel to each other. We just want to keep judging each other on our looks.

I don't like how cruel humans can be.

There are people who just love to destroy other people. It saddens me to admit that, I think, at whatever state of human civilisation we arrive at, the will to destroy other people is something that is innate in some people.

Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?

What I'm starting to really grapple with, as someone who likes to tell stories, is that humans more than any other animal species seem open and willing to control, assert dominance, and behave cruelly. That's a whole kind of new nightmare to really have to face about your own species. That we are, in some respects, cannibalistic, in that we are willing to destroy ourselves. That's really something for me to be exploring over the long haul.

Humans are capable of so much creativity and goodness and at the same time they are destructive and cruel. (Leta)

Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.

When the preponderance of human beings choose to act with justice and generosity and kindness, then learning and love and decency prevail. When the preponderance of human beings choose power, greed, and indifference to suffering, the world is filled with war, poverty, and cruelty.

The mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every solitary beaver swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible.

That is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in despite of humanity.

Unrestrained greed means the ruin of the great woods and the drying up of the sources of the rivers.

I think it was a realization of this cancer, an understanding of the broader implications of what cancer is. The greed, the ravaging of lands and seas for profit, the taking of things that don't belong to us; what we've done to the environment in this fast-paced, careless hunger. I think all of that was happening in my body.

Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a co-ordinated view about the planet, it's going to get worse and worse.

We called her Mother Earth. Because she gave birth to us, and then we sucked her dry.

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

There is a very real danger that we will kill everything on this planet now that we have the technological power to do so.

We batter this planet as if we had someplace else to go.

We shall be remembered in history as the most cruel, and therefore the most unwise, generation of men that ever yet troubled the earth: the most cruel in proportion to their sensibility, the most unwise in proportion to their science. No people, understanding pain, ever inflicted so much: no people, understanding facts, ever acted on them so little.

We're destroying the planet, and the planet rebels.

Man is the only animal that is cruel. It kills just for the sake of it.