Tom Lehrer Quotes
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Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.
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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
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Don't solicit for your sister, it's not nice. Unless you get a good percentage of her price.
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The civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it, owing to the nature of the laws, as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on. But we know what's really involved, dirty books are fun. That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that.
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I wasn't really a performer by temperament.
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It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.
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To me, being funny is more important than making a point, but I don't know. Most politicians are so interested in making points that they don't ... I'd rather be funny myself, and I'd rather listen to somebody with a little sense of humor.
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Once you've heard the joke, it's not funny anymore, but it's the way it's told. And I think that's the same with the music: The reason some of my songs have lasted longer is there's a lot of stuff packed in there. You want to hear them more than once.
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The audiences like to think that satire is doing something. But, in fact, it is mostly to leave themselves satisfied. Satisfied rather than angry, which is what they should be.
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"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it." It's always seemed to me that this is precisely the sort of dynamic, positive thinking that we so desperately need today in these trying times of crisis and universal brouhaha.
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Bad weather always looks worse through a window.
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Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way.
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I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.
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I think that if people are having trouble communicating with one another, the least they can do is SHUT UP.
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They love us everywhere we go. So when in doubt, send the Marines.
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I feel that if a person has problems communicating the very least he can do is to shut up.
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If you asked me to write a rock song or a rap song, I couldn't do it because they're not in my fingers.
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From the three, you then use one to make eight ones. You add those ones to the three, and you get one-three base eight, or, in other words, In base ten you have eleven, and you take away seven. And seven from eleven is four. Now go back to the sixty-fours, you're left with two.
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Angels we have heard on High Tell us to go out and Buy.
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I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up.
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The audience usually has to be with you, I'm afraid. I always regarded myself as not even preaching to the converted, I was titillating the converted.
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When someone makes a move Of which we don't approve, Who is it that always intervenes? U.N. and O.A.S., They have their place, I guess, But first send the Marines!
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If the hoods don't get you, the monoxide will.
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I don't have the temperament of a performer, and I certainly couldn't do it every night.