Tom Lehrer Quotes
-
Hark, the Herald Tribune sings, Advertising wondrous things!
-
I would do nightclubs and concerts - particularly concerts, which is mostly what I did - and only people who already agreed with me would show up. People weren't going to come and inadvertently turn on their television set and find this offensive stuff coming out.
-
Things are much more complicated. Feminism versus pornography, for example. There are a lot of feminists who think it is bad, but others think it's good.
-
Comedy is very important. For one thing, it keeps you sane. But it's not really a conversion. I mean, it's marginally a conversion, because if people tune in or go to a nightclub or even watch television, and hear that a lot of other people are laughing at something you thought was not funny, at least it'll force you to reconsider.
-
We are the folk song army, every one of us cares. We all hate poverty, war, and injustice unlike the rest of you squares.
-
Always predict the worst, and you'll be hailed as a prophet.
-
When correctly viewed, everything is lewd.
-
I find that people can pass me on the street who've just seen my picture in the paper and they wouldn't recognize me. If they'd seen me on television, the heads turn. They say, "Wait a minute. I don't know who that is, but he's somebody.
-
Everything is so weird in politics that it's very hard to be funny about it, I think.
-
The real issues I don't think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn't ban landmines...I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them. And that's not funny....OK, well, if I say that, I might get a shock laugh, but it's not really satire.
-
As for language, almost everything goes now. That is not to say that verbal taboos have disappeared, but merely that they have shifted somewhat. In my youth, for example, there were certain words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can say them, but you can't say 'girl'.
-
Base eight is just like base ten really, if you're missing two fingers.
-
For there is surely nothing more beautiful in this world than the sight of a lone man facing single-handedly a half a ton of angry pot roast!
-
I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity.
-
Well I wasn't really attacking the religious beliefs in the song 'The Vatican Rag', I was attacking the formality of the rituals of the Catholic church; however, people took it wrongly.
-
Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
-
Apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?
-
In one word he told me the secret of success in mathematics: plagiarize; only be sure always to call it . . . research.
-
But in the new (math) approach, the important thing is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer.
-
When you attend a funeral, It is sad to think that sooner o' Later those you love will do the same for you. And you may have thought it tragic, Not to mention other adjec- Tives, to think of all the weeping they will do. (But don't you worry.
-
Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.
-
If I can't get people to commit themselves on whether or not there is a square root of two, then I won't touch on God or anything here
-
All books can be indecent books, though recent books are bolder. For filth, I'm glad to say, is in the mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, everything is lewd. I could tell you things about Peter Pan and the Wizard of OZ, there's a dirty old man!
-
I wasn't really a performer by temperament.