Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year.
I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!
In my youth there were words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can't say 'girl.'
Don't solicit for your sister, it's not nice. Unless you get a good percentage of her price.
Filth, I'm glad to say, is in the mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, everything is lewd.
There's ten stuffed heads in my trophy room right now, two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow.
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.
I think that if people are having trouble communicating with one another, the least they can do is SHUT UP.
I'm not interested in promoting myself or revealing to total strangers anything about me. That's not my job.
I have always found it interesting... that there are people who regard copyright infringement as a form of flattery.
On my income tax 1040 it says 'Check this box if you are blind.' I wanted to put a check mark about three inches away.
In one word he told me the secret of success in mathematics: plagiarize; only be sure always to call it . . . research.
We are the folk song army, every one of us cares. We all hate poverty, war, and injustice unlike the rest of you squares.
When you're in a public profession like I was, and you stop doing it like I did, people think you're either crazy or dead.
But in the new (math) approach, the important thing is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer.
I'm very proud of myself on my, whatever the literacy is, I'm pretentious, totally pretentious. I like to say 'hmm', for example.
And although I'm all for freedom of expression and against censorship, there are certain things I'm not willing to go to jail for.
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
So long, Mom I'm off to drop the bomb So don't wait up for me But while you swelter Down there in your shelter You can see me On your TV
Disclaimer: If anyone disagrees with anything I say, I am quite prepared to not only retract it, but also to deny under oath I ever said it.
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 figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit.
Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics/ And the Catholics hate the Protestants/ And the Hindus hate the Muslims/ And everybody hates the Jews.
The poor folks hate the rich folks, and the rich folks hate the poor folks. All of my folks hate all of your folks, it's American as apple pie.
On Christmas day you can't get sore, your fellow man you must adore. There's time to cheat him all the more the other three hundred and sixty-four
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.
I always prided myself on at least trying to be literate and use the right words, and if the audience didn't get it, then they could go home and look it up.
Once all the Germans were warlike and mean But that couldn't happen again We taught them a lesson in nineteen eighteen And they've hardly bothered us since then
I'm not an original composer. The tunes are not stolen from other tunes necessarily except in a few cases, but they're in the style of songs that I grew up with.
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!
And we will all go together when we go. What a comforting fact that is to know. Universal bereavement, An inspiring achievement, Yes, we will all go together when we go.
There's something mathematically satisfying about music: notes fit together and harmony and all that. And mathematics has to do with abstractions and making connections.
If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend or, perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.
If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.
The Army has carried the American ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability.
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.
No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has "The Truth". To be an atheist is almost as arrogant as to be a fundamentalist. But then again, I can get pretty arrogant.
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.
I thought about majoring in Math, Chemistry and English, but Math had the fewest requirements, so I went with it. I knew I wanted to teach, and Math was my field, so I studied Math.
If I see a movie star in the department store buying something, I'll kind of sidle up and see what they're saying, what they look like, how they sound. That's an invasion of privacy.
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.
The people who were in college in the '50s were my first real audience, and their kids, the people who found my records in the cabinet during their 'Mad 'magazine years picked me up also.
Oh we will all fry together when we fry. We'll be french fried potatoes by and by. There will be no more misery When the world is our rotisserie, Yes, we will all fry together when we fry.
I've heard it quoted that I was dead. You can't believe anything you read. That was just an off-hand remark somebody picked up, and now it's been quoted and quoted, and therefore misquoted.
The Army has carried the American... ideal to its logical conclusion... Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on the grounds of ability.
The people who came to hear me perform or to buy my records were not the type who would be offended [by the song 'The Vatican Rag']. But I gather that there were other people who were offended.
I find that if you take the various popular song forms to their logical extremes, you can arrive at almost anything from the ridiculous to the obscene-or, as they say in New York, sophisticated.
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 satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.
Alas, irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness, at least in the so-called mass media. What we have now - to quote myself at my most pretentious - is a nimiety of scurrility with a concomitant exiguity of taste.