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" 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. "

Tom Lehrer

Out

Figure

Problem

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" Be prepared, and be careful not to do your good deeds when there's no one watching you. "

" 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. "

" Bad weather always looks worse through a window. "

" I like Jon Stewart. He's not as obnoxious as Dennis Miller, whom I really can't stand. "

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" Laughter is involuntary. If it's funny you laugh. "

" I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that! "

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" 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. "

" Apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play? "

" I feel that if a person has problems communicating the very least he can do is to shut up. "

Tom Lehrer

Person

Shut Up

" I wasn't really a performer by temperament. "

" One of the things I'm proudest of is, on my record 'That Was the Year that Was' in 1965, I made a joke about spending $20 billion sending some clown to the moon. I was against the manned space program then, and I'm even more against it now, that whole waste of money. "

" 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. "

" I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Tom Lehrer

Audience

College

" 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. "

" If a person feels he can't communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it. "

Tom Lehrer

Person

Feels

" 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. "

Tom Lehrer

Writing

Night

" San Francisco is a city of twenty-something millionaire white kids named Doug. "

" I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up. "

" I was immersed in popular songs of the time, of the '30s and '40s. I was writing songs, making fun of the attitudes of those songs, in the musical style of the songs themselves; love songs, folk songs, marches, football. "

" Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. "

" Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it. "

Tom Lehrer

Life

Piano

" 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. Every now and then I wrote something, and every now and then I didn't. The second just outnumbered the first. "

" Counting in octal is just like counting in decimal, if you don't use your thumbs. "

" I stopped performing because I don't have the temperament of a performer. You have to want to do the same thing over and over again. Once I got it right, I didn't want to do it again. I always use the analogy of a novelist who has to read his novel in public night after night. I just didn't want to do it. "

" I'm not interested in promoting myself or revealing to total strangers anything about me. That's not my job. "

" 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. "

" An actress must never lose her ego - without it she has no talent. "