Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

It's not fair," I said. "It's just so goddamned unfair." "The world," he said, "is not a wishgranting factory.

I think it's unfair, but they have the right as fallible, screwed-up humans to be unfair; that's the human condition.

No matter how corrupt and unjust a convict may be, he loves fairness more than anything else. If the people placed over him are unfair, from year to year he lapses into an embittered state characterized by an extreme lack of faith.

With these vast advantages, ordinary and extraordinary, one would have supposed the North would have been content, and would have at least respected the security and tranquility of such obedient and profitable brethren; but such is not human nature.

The law is cruel.

I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just.

Yes, disappointment over perceived unfairness, injustice, promises not kept, tends to go hand in hand with increasing prosperity. Expectations are dashed. What can I say!

Justice is like a train that is nearly always late.

Effective action is always unjust.

The world is not based on fairness. Human beings can rise to fairness, can administer something that makes it fair or just. But that's not God.

Life isn't fair," he said, in his undisguised voice, and for once the Baudelaire orphans agreed with every word the man said.

Nobody wants justice.

So many great people are dead, and so many assholes I know are still alive. Karma's bullshit. I wish it was true, but it ain't.

The satirical direction I have chosen is an indication of my disappointment in man, which is the opposite way of saying that I have high expectations for the human race.

To think, I have had more than 60 years of hard struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel.

I retired from public Business from a thorough Conviction that it was not in my Power to do any Good, and very much disgusted with Measures, which appeared to me inconsistent with common Policy and Justice.

Injustice is censured because the censures are afraid of suffering, and not from any fear which they have of doing injustice.

I got fed up with the human race, really. I got a very negative feeling about human potentials. And for a while, I thought I might write a book without any human beings in it whatsoever.

There's never going to be a system that is fair to everyone.

The problem isn't that people don't understand how good things are. It's that they know, from personal experience, that things really aren't that good.

Most kids are smarter than most grown-ups. Kids see the world in black and white... They look through all the garbage and see a world run by fools and dullards and lazy people. And there's nothing they can do about it because they have no power.

Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.

Job's forthright indictment of the injustice of this world is surely right. The ways of the world are weird and much more unpredictable than either scientists or theologians generally make things look.

Looking for equality everywhere is a huge mistake because equals are terrible and boring. But a sense of fairness and justice is a totally different thing and a much more complex thing.

If I could get my membership fee back, I'd resign from the human race.