Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Will the American People Never Cease to Oppress and Torture the Helpless poor?

Oppression is the essence of power.

Oppression is but another name for irresponsible power, if history is to be trusted.

I would be with those who say the hierarchy in the United States has badly mishandled this whole situation.

We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of 'choice' and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social and civil death.

Government exists to protect the interests of the powerful from the will of the people.

There is a kind of theme that runs through the modern world that human relationships should be looked at in terms of power relationships, in terms of the manipulation of power. That is one of the really wicked ways of looking at the world. It strips people of their humanness.

People who bear the brunt of dominant economic and military power have always resented, even hated, the subordination they experience while admiring grudgingly the institutions that sustain the subordination.

When the people are sheep, the government is always a wolf.

Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong.

Sex and race, because they are easy, visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups, and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends.

You don't fight injustice by asking to become part of the system that committed the injustice against you in the first place. That's like a freed slave striving to become a slave owner.

Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.

In a change of masters the poor change nothing except their master's name.

Despotism is the only form of government which may with safety to itself, neglect the education of its infant poor.

As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.

No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.

Why do you all push us around?

The value systems of those with access to power and of those far removed from such access cannot be the same. The viewpoint of the privileged is unlike that of the underprivileged.

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.

When you come from desperate poverty, and that's exactly what I come from, you know that nonsenses are not to be tolerated. I'm not sure who gains from chaos, but I know it's not the poor folks in the council flats. The politics of vindictiveness is never, ever anything like a solution.

What offends me the most when I hear criticisms about this so-called Africa bias is how quick we are to focus on the words and propaganda of a few powerful, influential individuals, and to forget about the millions of anonymous people who suffer from their crimes.

Give the peasants neither life nor death.

And what sort of philosophical doctrine is thi - that numbers confer unlimited rights, that they take from some persons all rights over themselves, and vest these rights in others.

The real problem is that the way that power is given out in our society pits us against each other.