Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

Tom Lehrer

Trying

Right

Myself

" 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

" 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. "

" 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 have always found it interesting... that there are people who regard copyright infringement as a form of flattery. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Eddie Izzard is wonderful, I think, but I've only seen that one HBO special he did. He's one of the few people who talk about stuff other than girlfriends and relationships and flatulence and genitalia. There are very few of them who actually talk about real stuff. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" You can't be satirical and not be offensive to somebody. "

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

Tom Lehrer

Person

Feels

" It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year. "

" I loved high school, but I wouldn't want to do it again. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When you get to fifty-two food becomes more important than sex. "

" When I was in college, there were certain words you couldn't say in front of a girl. Now you can say them, but you can't say 'girl.' "

" It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Bad weather always looks worse through a window. "

" In my youth there were words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can't say 'girl.' "

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

" Political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize. "

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

Tom Lehrer

Hate

Know

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