Steve Allen Quotes
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Ideas have consequences, and totally erroneous ideas are likely to have destructive consequences.
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Radio is the theater of the mind; television is the theater of the mindless.
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Nothing is better than the unintended humor of reality.
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Ours is a government of checks and balances. The Mafia and crooked businessmen make out checks, and the politicians and other compromised officials improve their bank balances.
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One social evil for which the New Testament is clearly in part responsible is anti-Semitism.
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One of the nice things about problems is that a good many of them do not exist except in our imaginations.
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If there is a God, the phrase that must disgust him is - holy war.
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Consider the wave of revulsion that floods the average person when he or she hears of the practice of human sacrifice by the Aztecs and other so-called primitive peoples. How savage and barbaric such practices seem. But when a Christian or Jew comes across human sacrifice in the Bible (see Jephthah's immolation of his daughter in Judges 11:30-40), is he or she repulsed?
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I cannot see how it can be argued that one should speak in tones of reverence and awe about the alleged divine instruction-in Psalms-to grab the defenseless bodies of innocent infants and dash their brains out against the nearest rocks or walls.
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Thousands of years ago only Christ could walk on the water. Today anybody can do it; you just step on the garbage.
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...we are entitled to make almost any reasonable assumption, but should resist making conclusions until evidence requires that we do so.
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This is The Tonight Show. I can't tell you too much about it, other than the fact that this program is going to go on forever.
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There are hundreds of millions who believe the Messiah has come. If he did, then it is unfortunately the case that his heroic sacrifice and death have had no effect whatsoever on the very problem his coming might have been expected to address, for history demonstrates, beyond question, that we Christians have been just as dangerous, singly and en masse, as non-Christians.
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Millions of Germans had absolute faith in Hitler. Millions of Russians had faith in Stalin. Millions of Chinese had faith in Mao. Billions have had faith in imaginary gods.
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Sometimes things which at the moment may be perceived as obstacles-and actually be obstacles, difficulties, or drawbacks-can in the long run result in some good end which would not have occurred if it had not been for the obstacle.
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Laughter would appear to be a physical reflex, although even if it is, this still leaves unanswered the question of why the human response to humor is a convulsive spasm of the respiratory mechanism rather than a crossing of the eyes or a waving of the arms.
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If the Old Testament were a reliable guide in the matter of capital punishment, half the people in the United States would have to be killed tomorrow.
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Totalitarianism is patriotism institutionalized.
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Physical fitness is in. I recently had a physical fit myself.
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The problem is that once the untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a religious philosophy - and it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational
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There is scarcely a page of the Bible on which an open mind does not perceive a contradiction, an unlikely story, an obvious error, an historical impossibility of one sort or another.
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There are few pages of history which do not demonstrate that public prayer and ritual never inoculated people against mass-madness and cruelty. What is needed is emphasis on morality and manners.
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Humor is a social lubricant that helps us get over some of the bad spots.
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In a rational society we would want our presidents to be teachers. In our actual society we insist they be cheerleaders.
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Everybody is somewhere.
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Without laughter life on our planet would be intolerable. So important is laughter to us that humanity highly rewards members of one of the most unusual professions on earth, those who make a living by inducing laughter in others. This is very strange if you stop to think of it: that otherwise sane and responsible citizens should devote their professional energies to causing others to make sharp, explosive barking-like exhalations.
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The Bible is unfortunately unclear on a long list of moral and social questions and sex is one of them. On the one hand, there are expressions of admiration for the reportedly virgin mother of Jesus, but other portions of scripture speak quite accommodatingly of polygamy.
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Civilization itself . . . can easily be swept aside when mob passions are aroused.
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I'm all for sex. Seven nights a week. Days, too.
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God is by definition the holder of all possible knowledge, it would be impossible for him to have faith in anything. Faith, then, is built upon ignorance and hope.
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Steve Allen
- Born: December 26, 1921
- Died: October 30, 2000
- Occupation: Television Personality