Tom Lehrer Quotes
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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.
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I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity.
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Laughter is involuntary. If it's funny you laugh.
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Bad weather always looks worse through a window.
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But in the new (math) approach, the important thing is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer.
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If you visit American city, You will find it very pretty. Just two things of which you must beware: Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air. Pollution, pollution, They got smog and sewage and mud. Turn on your tap and get hot and cold running crud. See the halibuts and the sturgeons Being wiped out by detergents. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, But they don't last long if they try. Pollution, pollution, You can use the latest toothpaste, And then rinse your mouth with industrial waste.
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I wasn't really a performer by temperament.
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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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I always like to make explicit the fact that before I went off not too long ago to fight in the trenches, I was a mathematician by profession. I don't like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living. I mean, it isn't as though I had to do this, you know, I could be making, oh, three thousand dollars a year just teaching.
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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. I have become, you might call it mature - I would call it senile - and I can see both sides. But you can't write a satirical song with 'but on the other hand' in it, or 'however'. It's got to be one-sided.
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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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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.
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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.
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In my youth there were words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can't say 'girl.'
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Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way.
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The reason most folksongs are so atrocious is that they were written by the people.
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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.
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There's ten stuffed heads in my trophy room right now, two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow.
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You cant be satirical and not be offensive to somebody.
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People would go anywhere to see a famous person in the flesh, no matter what they do.
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Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air!
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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!
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Always predict the worst, and you'll be hailed as a prophet.
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Don't write naughty words on the wall if you can't spell!
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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.
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Counting in octal is just likst counting in decimal--if you don't use your thumbs.
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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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I don't have the temperament of a performer, and I certainly couldn't do it every night.
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Apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?
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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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