Life & Wisdom Quote by Kurt Vonnegut

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be"

Kurt Vonnegut, Author

About this Quote

Vonnegut’s line lands like a friendly warning with a hidden blade: identity isn’t an inner essence you occasionally express, it’s a set of rehearsed behaviors that harden into reality. The sly move is the moral inversion. Most self-help logic insists you should “be yourself” and treat performance as fake. Vonnegut, the patron saint of deadpan apocalypse, treats performance as the only self that reliably exists. Pretending isn’t a detour from authenticity; it’s the manufacturing process.

The subtext is cultural as much as personal. In a country obsessed with branding, reinvention, and meritocratic theater, “pretend” becomes a survival skill that quietly turns into a prison. The sentence is built like a trapdoor: the first clause sounds liberating (you can become things), the second snaps shut (you can become things). That pivot is classic Vonnegut - comic fatalism delivered in plain language, as if he’s describing gravity.

Context matters: Vonnegut wrote from the afterimage of Dresden and the bureaucratic insanity of modern war, where roles (“soldier,” “enemy,” “good citizen”) aren’t costumes; they’re permissions. His fiction keeps returning to how systems recruit people into scripts and then blame them for reading their lines too well.

The intent, then, isn’t to scold individual impostors. It’s to expose how easily irony curdles into character. Play at cruelty, cynicism, or indifference long enough and you won’t be pretending anymore - you’ll be practicing.

Quote Details

Topic	Wisdom
Source	Verified source: Mother Night (Kurt Vonnegut, 1961) Text match: 99.71% Provider: Cross-Reference Evidence: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. (Preface/Introduction (appears as the stated moral at the very beginning; often paginated in later editions as roman numerals, e.g., p. v or p. vii)). Primary-source location: Kurt Vonnegut states this as the moral in the book’s opening preface/introduction to his novel Mother Night. Many online and secondary references specifically tie the wording to the preface/intro (often noted as added/new to the 1966 hardcover edition), and the quote is widely reproduced with the ‘about’ included (“careful about what we pretend to be”). The earliest publication of the novel is 1961; however, I was not able (from publicly viewable primary text scans in this search) to conclusively verify whether this exact sentence appears in the 1961 first edition text versus being introduced/standardized in the 1966 preface (a number of references explicitly point to the 1966 preface). To prove ‘first published’ with high confidence, you would need to check a physical or scanned copy of the 1961 first edition and/or the 1962 paperback (and compare against the 1966 Harper & Row edition preface).
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