Paul Krassner Quotes

#1. Listen to the speeches, one after another telling the audience what it already knows, evoking applause with necessary cliches, no longer shocking anybody with the shocking facts of the war because you can become so jaded with horror that you develop an emotional callous.

Paul Krassner

#2. I guess I'm a spiritual secularist, if that's not an oxymoron. My paths of secularism and spirituality are the same: I try to do the appropriate thing at each moment.

Paul Krassner

#3. I had become an atheist at the age of thirteen, when atomic bombs were dropped on Japan.

Paul Krassner

#4. There is indeed a business like show business. It's the news.

Paul Krassner

#5. I Used To Believe In Reincarnation, But That Was In a Past Life.

Paul Krassner

#6. I am neither for conformity nor non-conformity. I am for individuality. If one's individuality is in effect non-conformity, then so be it. But basically, one's individuality consists of conformity
to one's self.

Paul Krassner

#7. Since I was both an atheist and an absurdist, I had decided that the most absurd thing I could do would be to develop an intimate relationship with the God I didn't believe in.

Paul Krassner

#8. False humility is better than no humility at all.

Paul Krassner

#9. Pope John Paul would be more popular if he called himself Pope John Paul George and Ringo.

Paul Krassner

#10. I think [audiences are] more aware now of the contradictions in mainstream culture, the phony piety that permeates society, the inhumane hypocrisy.

Paul Krassner

#11. Irreverence is our only sacred cow.

Paul Krassner

#12. For years, reality has been nipping at the heels of satire. Now, it's finally caught up. I don't need to make this stuff up.

Paul Krassner

#13. Avoid internalizing society's sexism, racism, ageism - pick an ism, any ism.

Paul Krassner

#14. As long as the government can arbitrarily decide which substances are legal and which are illegal, then those who remain behind bars for illegal substances are political prisoners

Paul Krassner

#15. Watch yourself as though you were observing a Martian.

Paul Krassner

#16. English is my second language. Laughter is my first.

Paul Krassner

#17. One - about cigarettes - I was pleased to see that anticigarette ad on the back issue of Hustler. I'm more offended by seeing ads for cigarettes in magazines than pictures of vaginas, because one kills and the other gives life - and I think that's an important difference.

Paul Krassner

#18. People don't like to be lectured to, but if you can make them laugh, their defenses come down, and for the time being they've accepted whatever truth is embedded in your humor.

Paul Krassner