Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

I identify with the 99 per cent.

A boycott is the most peaceful and passive kind of protest there is and can be. We do not say we hate you or even say that you are wrong. We just say that we don’t want to ride your bus.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, in general, by putting this idea out there that the one percent is leeching off the 99 percent, is making a new discussion, making people figure out how to withhold their labor and come and put their issues on the table with the ruling class all over the country and all over the world.

Fortunately most of the people who were involved in anti-Vietnam activity did not con themselves into being like the violent people they didn't want.

Civil disobedience is the only nonviolent escape from the soul-destroying heat of violence.

Passive resistance is a sport for gentleman (and ladies)-just like the pursuit of war, a heroic enterprise for the ruling classes but a grievous burden on the rest.

It is important to keep protesting, to keep forcing a conversation in the public arena. In any case, when you know what the right thing to do is, or that something must be said, it can be immoral and dangerous not to act.

The day of the march, we were forbidden to go to the march site. The man I worked for, the Presbyterian minister, knew we would want to be sort of martyrs for the cause and risk arrest. He didn't want any of that going on. So he made us stay in the neighborhood.

Organizing is an educational process. The best educational process in the union is the picket line and the boycott. You learn about life.

Civil disobedience is a preparation for mute suffering.

The avowed policy of non-co-operation has been not to make political use of the disputes between labour and capital.

Ours is a civil fight, and imprisonment as a civil prisoner has got to be earned by the strict observance of the programme.

For a nonviolent struggle, there is no age limit. The blind, the maimed and the bed-ridden may serve, and not only men but women also.

I talked to Shailene Woodley the next day [after arrest]. She was fine, and she was very happy. She knew that it brought attention to a cause that she cared very much about. She was in high spirits and knew that was a possibility when she was protesting. The people who arrested her, if they were trying to prove a point of not to protest, they only helped the cause.

Nonviolent action, the Negro saw, was the way to supplement, not replace, the progress of change. It was the way to divest himself of passivity without arraying himself in vindictive force.

If they are truly nonviolent, they must also realize that civil disobedience is an impossibility till the preliminary work of construction is done.

The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.

On Gandhi: Don’t ever forget, that we were not lead by a saint with his head in clouds, but by a master tactician with his feet on the ground.

Civil disobedience means capacity for unlimited suffering, without the intoxicating excitement of killing.

All those people who went out [to Occupy Wall Street] missed work, didn't get paid. Those were individuals who were already feeling the effects of inequality, so they didn't have a lot to lose. And then the individuals who were louder, more disruptive and, in many ways, more effective at drawing attention to their concerns were immediately castigated by authorities. They were cordoned off, pepper-sprayed, thrown in jail.

Civil disobedience does not admit of any violence or countenancing of violence directly or indirectly.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

There is a world-wide conflict between capital and labour, and the poor envy the rich.

The power of nonviolence is not circumstance-specific. It is as applicable to the problems that confront us now, as to problems that confronted generations in the past. It is not a medicine or a solution so much as a healing process. It is the active spiritual immune system of humanity.

The ultimate goal of those who blame workers for Wall Street's economic crisis is to unravel the fabric of our common life in pursuit of greed and power.