Best 92 quotes of Tom Lehrer on MyQuotes

Tom Lehrer

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    Alas, irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness, at least in the so-called mass media. What we have now - to quote myself at my most pretentious - is a nimiety of scurrility with a concomitant exiguity of taste.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    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!

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    Always predict the worst, and you'll be hailed as a prophet.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    And although I'm all for freedom of expression and against censorship, there are certain things I'm not willing to go to jail for.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    And we will all go together when we go. What a comforting fact that is to know. Universal bereavement, An inspiring achievement, Yes, we will all go together when we go.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    Angels we have heard on High Tell us to go out and Buy.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    As for language, almost everything goes now. That is not to say that verbal taboos have disappeared, but merely that they have shifted somewhat. In my youth, for example, there were certain words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can say them, but you can't say 'girl'.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    Bad weather always looks worse through a window.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    Base eight is just like base ten really, if you're missing two fingers.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    Be careful not to do your good deeds when there's no one watching you.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    But in the new (math) approach, the important thing is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    Comedy is very important. For one thing, it keeps you sane. But it's not really a conversion. I mean, it's marginally a conversion, because if people tune in or go to a nightclub or even watch television, and hear that a lot of other people are laughing at something you thought was not funny, at least it'll force you to reconsider.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    Comedy is very important, yes. For one thing, it keeps you sane. But it's not really a conversion. I mean, it's marginally a conversion, because if people tune in or go to a nightclub or even watch television, and hear that a lot of other people are laughing at something you thought was not funny, at least it'll force you to reconsider.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    Counting in octal is just likst counting in decimal--if you don't use your thumbs.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    Disclaimer: If anyone disagrees with anything I say, I am quite prepared to not only retract it, but also to deny under oath I ever said it.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air!

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    Don't solicit for your sister, it's not nice. Unless you get a good percentage of her price.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    Don't write naughty words on the wall if you can't spell!

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    Filth, I'm glad to say, is in the mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, everything is lewd.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    For there is surely nothing more beautiful in this world than the sight of a lone man facing single-handedly a half a ton of angry pot roast!

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    From the three, you then use one to make eight ones. You add those ones to the three, and you get one-three base eight, or, in other words, In base ten you have eleven, and you take away seven. And seven from eleven is four. Now go back to the sixty-fours, you're left with two.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    Hark, the Herald Tribune sings, Advertising wondrous things!

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    I ache for the touch of your lips dear, but much more for the touch of your whips dear.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    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. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    I don't have the temperament of a performer, and I certainly couldn't do it every night.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

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

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    If I can't get people to commit themselves on whether or not there is a square root of two, then I won't touch on God or anything here

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    I find enough mystery in mathematics to satisfy my spiritual needs. I think, for example, that pi is mysterious enough (don't get me started!) without having to worry about God. Or if pi isn't enough, how about fractals? or quantum mechanics?

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    I find that if you take the various popular song forms to their logical extremes, you can arrive at almost anything from the ridiculous to the obscene-or, as they say in New York, sophisticated.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    If you asked me to write a rock song or a rap song, I couldn't do it because they're not in my fingers.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

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

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

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

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    I'm not an original composer. The tunes are not stolen from other tunes necessarily except in a few cases, but they're in the style of songs that I grew up with.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    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. And that's not funny.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    I'm very proud of myself on my, whatever the literacy is, I'm pretentious, totally pretentious. I like to say 'hmm', for example.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

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

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    In one word he told me the secret of success in mathematics: plagiarize; only be sure always to call it . . . research.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    I recall this sergeant's informing me and my "room-mates" of this rather deplorable fact the army didn't have any official, excuse me, didn't have no official song and suggested that we work on this in our copious free time.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    Irreverence is easy - whats hard is wit.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    I think that if people are having trouble communicating with one another, the least they can do is SHUT UP.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

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

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

    I've heard it quoted that I was dead. You can't believe anything you read. That was just an off-hand remark somebody picked up, and now it's been quoted and quoted, and therefore misquoted.

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

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

  • By Anonym
    Tom Lehrer

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