Mark Vonnegut Quotes

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.

Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.

Reading taught me how to write.

The written word is everything.

A reading man and woman is a ready man and woman, but a writing man and woman is exact.

Books are feeders of brothels.

The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one — but no one at all — can tell you what to read and when and how.

Books are the greatest weapons against the assholes of the world.

Anyone who doesn't read doesn't have any business writing.

If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be.

You can imprison but you can't enslave a man who argues with his books.

Let us pick up our books and our pens, they are the most powerful weapons.

Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.

The first slave to read and write was the first to run away.

The boy spends most of his time reading. And writing, of course. He copies out sections of books, writes out words and symbols he does not understand at first but that become intimately familiar beneath his ink-stained fingers, formed again and again in increasingly steady lines.

People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.

read thousands of books and I will power myself with knowledge. Pens and books are the weapons that defeat terrorism.

To read and write is a paradise.

You really can’t write unless you read. You have to know what the game is all about.

Who often reads, will sometimes wish to write.

People are difficult to rule, because of their knowledge.

Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods. It would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to tax) but "to bind us in all cases whatsoever," and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious, for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.

The world was hers for the reading.

Existing libraries, in their very being, seem to question the authority of those in power.