Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

That fatal drollery called a representative government.

You can't get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.

Political satire is a serious thing. In democratic newspapers throughout the world there are daily cartoons that often are not even funny, as is the case especially in many English-language newspapers. Instead, they contain a political message, and the artist takes full responsibility.

I think it's a terrible shame that politics has become show business.

I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.

If it were not for the government, we would have nothing to laugh at in France.

Trump is unloved in his own house. A figure of ridicule, a theatrical creation, he is almost sympathetic. He was told by the greedy and the outright stupid that he would make a swell president. The Liar's Paradox has spun out of control, with liars lying to a liar who believed the lie. What would that be called? Fox News, I think.

I feel like a lot of the guys who are trying to do political or socially relevant humor just haven't figured out who the enemy is.

Vice president: A spare tire on the automobile of government.

The left wants to transform America away from founding ideals, and this is it. And they know it. And they're doing everything they, and they've got the media helping them and so forth. I think one of the ways of exposing 'em is to ridicule 'em. I mean, laughter is the simplest way to humiliate somebody. Laugh at them, it shrinks them.

Democracy is a very admirable form of government - for dogs

A lot of people are waking up to human history, but so many people have been conditioned by the government controlled media to think that it's cool not to care.

The Senate is the only show in the world where the cash customers have to sit in the balcony.

It is one of the evils of democratical governments, that the people, not always seeing and frequently misled, must often feel before they can act.

To the haranguers of the populace among the ancients, succeed among the moderns your writers of political pamphlets and news-papers, and your coffee-house talkers.

[I]f you want instant, reflexive support for the US government's police and military powers, MSNBC is the place to turn these days.

I visit Fox News every now and again, and it's nice, because the Eye of Mordor is above the building.

The government is just you know, blowing the doors off the media. And not everywhere, and I think, this is where you know, a lot of those blog reporters and all of those things are bringing a lot of urgency and a lot of momentum to stories that wouldn't normally carry any momentum.

Government should be weak, amateurish and ridiculous. At present, it fulfills only a third of the role.

Last year, on a long car trip, I was listening to Rush Limbaugh shout. I usually agree with Rush Limbaugh; therefore I usually don't listen to him. I listen to NPR: "World to end-poor and minorities hardest hit." I like to argue with the radio.

I've gotten balanced coverage and broad coverage - all we could have asked. ... For heaven sakes, we kid about the liberal media, but every republican on earth does that.

In 1916, when Johnny Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my studio at the south end of the town at five o'clock one May morning, we had no idea of the immense possibilities, or of the thorny but successful career, that awaited the new invention. On a piece of cardboard we pasted a mishmash of advertisements for hernia belts, student song books and dog food, labels from schnaps and wine bottles, and photographs from picture papers, cut up at will in such a way as to say, in pictures, what would have been banned by the censors if we had said it in words.

The trouble is nowadays that parts of the media operate in a very partisan way. There's no point in complaining about it, that's the way it is. But let's be clear, a lot of it is driven by the views of a pretty small number of people, rather than a normal standard of journalism.

A writer is like a gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government. If he is a good writer he will never like any government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him.