Tom Lehrer Quotes
I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record.
Quotes to Explore
-
People do not lack strength; they lack will.
-
How can we educators claim credit for understanding, let alone teaching, the 'global mind' without a single course on the impact of religion on every day life?
-
I taught up in Maine a couple of times and wasn't able to take a single picture. All that blue sky! Ugh. Sparkling clear air, just terrible. I couldn't do it.
-
My hand is the extension of the thinking process - the creative process.
-
One is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are.
-
I always enjoy impersonating my characters in the first-person singular.
-
America is a knowledge-based society, where information counts as much as material resources. Therefore those with the power to define what qualifies as knowledge - to determine what are the accepted facts - wield the greatest social and political power.
-
Random things are luxurious to people. It's personal.
-
We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky.
-
The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.
-
Hillary Clinton is not going to be able to create jobs, I will tell you right now.
-
Darkness might seem to obscure what's happening, but I find it's always pretty revelatory: it brings out the awe in us, the fear in us, the excitement of exploring the hidden or unknown. It seems to conceal, but it really shines a light on what we want, what we need, and what we'll do to get it. Especially when we think no one can see us.
-
I don't believe you have to have eating disorders and mental illness to screw up.
-
Never a lip is curved with pain that can't be kissed into smiles again.
-
In 1688, Edward Lloyd opened a coffeehouse on London's seafront popular among underwriters, men in powdered wigs with mathematical minds and steely constitutions who offered to compensate owners if their boats were lost at sea.
-
Most of the time, you do films and they can be big films, but you are rarely aware of the fan base that comes with it.
-
The scripts of 'The Wire' are fantastic - the scripts of 'Breaking Bad,' the scripts of 'Mad Men,' the scripts of 'The Sopranos,' the scripts of 'Battlestar Galactica.' You could keep going on. They're incredibly well written.
-
Zippy is living in the moment.
-
You shouldn't try to manufacture progress.
-
I have seen Colonial churches since I was very small, Colonial painting and polychrome sculpture. And that was all I saw. There was not a single modern painting in any museum, not a Picasso, not a Braque, not a Chagall. The museums had Colombian painters from the eighteenth century and, of course, I saw Pre-Columbian art. That was my exposure.
-
My one thing is respect. I don't care about anything else. You should respect everyone around you - the people who work for you, peers. Be classy.
-
To manage one must lead. To lead, one must understand the work that he and his people are responsible for
-
I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record.
