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" 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. "

Tom Lehrer

Harmony

Together

Music

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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.' "

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

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

" 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! "

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" 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. "

" 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

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College

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My last public performance for money was in 1967. For free, it was 1972, with the exception of two little one-shot, one-song things. But that's just for friends, out of friendship for the people involved, and also because it was fun. "

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

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

" 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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

Tom Lehrer

Life

Piano

" Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize. "

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

" 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 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. "

" Irreverence is easy - what's hard is wit. "

" 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.' "

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

" 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. "

" Bad weather always looks worse through a window. "