Tom Lehrer Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Tom Lehrer quote about:
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“Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.”
-- Tom Lehrer -
“Always predict the worst, and you'll be hailed as a prophet.”
-- 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.”
-- 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.”
-- Tom Lehrer -
“Bad weather always looks worse through a window.”
-- 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.”
-- Tom Lehrer -
“We are the folk song army, every one of us cares. We all hate poverty, war, and injustice unlike the rest of you squares.”
-- Tom Lehrer -
“Well I wasn't really attacking the religious beliefs, I was attacking the formality of the rituals of the Catholic church; however, people took it wrongly.”
-- 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.”
-- Tom Lehrer -
“The people who came to hear me perform or to buy my records were not the type who would be offended. But I gather that there were other people who were offended.”
-- Tom Lehrer -
“I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!”
-- 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.”
-- Tom Lehrer -
“I feel that if a person has problems communicating the very least he can do is to shut up.”
-- 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.”
-- Tom Lehrer -
“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.”
-- Tom Lehrer -
“Everything is so weird in politics that it's very hard to be funny about it, I think.”
-- Tom Lehrer -
“On my income tax 1040 it says 'Check this box if you are blind.' I wanted to put a check mark about three inches away.”
-- 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.”
-- Tom Lehrer -
“Be careful not to do your good deeds when there's no one watching you.”
-- Tom Lehrer -
“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.”
-- Tom Lehrer -
“Political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize.”
-- Tom Lehrer -
“I would do nightclubs and concerts - particularly concerts, which is mostly what I did - and only people who already agreed with me would show up. People weren't going to come and inadvertently turn on their television set and find this offensive stuff coming out.”
-- Tom Lehrer -
“I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up.”
-- 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.”
-- Tom Lehrer -
“It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.”
-- 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.”
-- 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.”
-- Tom Lehrer -
“People would go anywhere to see a famous person in the flesh, no matter what they do.”
-- 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.”
-- Tom Lehrer -
“I don't have the temperament of a performer, and I certainly couldn't do it every night.”
-- Tom Lehrer
