Top 100 Tom Lehrer Quotes
#1. You can raise welts like nobody else, as we dance to the Masochism Tango.
Tom Lehrer
#2. 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.
Tom Lehrer
#3. But in the new (math) approach, the important thing is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer.
Tom Lehrer
#4. Bad weather always looks worse through a window.
Tom Lehrer
#5. Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air!
Tom Lehrer
#6. There's ten stuffed heads in my trophy room right now, two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow.
Tom Lehrer
#7. I like Jon Stewart. He's not as obnoxious as Dennis Miller, whom I really can't stand.
Tom Lehrer
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way.
Tom Lehrer
#12. If the hoods don't get you, the monoxide will.
Tom Lehrer
#13. 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.
Tom Lehrer
#14. 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
#15. An actress must never lose her ego - without it she has no talent.
Tom Lehrer
#16. 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.
Tom Lehrer
#17. 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.'
Tom Lehrer
#18. When you get to fifty-two food becomes more important than sex.
Tom Lehrer
#19. 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
#20. Irreverence is easy - what's hard is wit.
Tom Lehrer
#21. 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
#22. I'm not interested in promoting myself or revealing to total strangers anything about me. That's not my job.
Tom Lehrer
#23. 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.
Tom Lehrer
#24. You can't be satirical and not be offensive to somebody.
Tom Lehrer
#25. Once all the Germans were warlike and mean But that couldn't happen again We taught them a lesson in nineteen eighteen And they've hardly bothered us since then
Tom Lehrer
#26. The audiences like to think that satire is doing something. But, in fact, it is mostly to leave themselves satisfied. Satisfied rather than angry, which is what they should be.
Tom Lehrer
#27. 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.
Tom Lehrer
#28. Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.
Tom Lehrer
#29. 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
Tom Lehrer
#30. 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
#31. If a person feels he can't communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.
Tom Lehrer
#32. Soon we'll be out amid the cold world's strife. Soon we'll be sliding down the razor blade of life. But as we go our sordid sep'rate ways, We shall ne'er forget thee, thou golden college days. Hearts full of youth, Hearts full of truth, Six parts gin to one part vermouth.
Tom Lehrer
#33. The Lord's our shepherd, says the psalm. But just in case, we better get a bomb.
Tom Lehrer
#34. San Francisco is a city of twenty-something millionaire white kids named Doug.
Tom Lehrer
#35. In one word he told me the secret of success in mathematics: plagiarize; only be sure always to call it ... research.
Tom Lehrer
#36. Laughter is involuntary. If it's funny you laugh.
Tom Lehrer
#37. 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.
Tom Lehrer
#38. Step up and shake the hand Of someone you can't stand, You can tolerate him if you try!
Tom Lehrer
#39. So long, Mom I'm off to drop the bomb So don't wait up for me But while you swelter Down there in your shelter You can see me On your TV
Tom Lehrer
#40. The audience usually has to be with you, I'm afraid. I always regarded myself as not even preaching to the converted, I was titillating the converted.
Tom Lehrer
#41. Everything is so weird in politics that it's very hard to be funny about it, I think.
Tom Lehrer
#42. I loved high school, but I wouldn't want to do it again.
Tom Lehrer
#43. No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has The Truth. To
be an atheist is almost as arrogant as to be a fundamentalist. But
then again, I can get pretty arrogant.
Tom Lehrer
#44. It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.
Tom Lehrer
#45. I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up.
Tom Lehrer
#46. 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
#47. The reason most folksongs are so atrocious is that they were written by the people.
Tom Lehrer
#48. Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.
Tom Lehrer
#49. Life is like a sewer - you get out of it what you put into it.
Tom Lehrer
#50. 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
#51. 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 ...
Tom Lehrer
#52. Think as you work, for in the final analysis, your worth to your company comes not only in solving problems, but also in anticipating them.
Tom Lehrer
#53. 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.
Tom Lehrer
#54. 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?
Tom Lehrer
#55. 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
#56. I think the people who say we need satire often mean, 'We need satire of them, not of us.
Tom Lehrer
#57. Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Tom Lehrer
#58. 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
#59. Be prepared, and be careful not to do your good deeds when there's no one watching you.
Tom Lehrer
#60. 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.
Tom Lehrer
#61. Counting in octal is just likst counting in decimal
if you don't use your thumbs.
Tom Lehrer
#62. You can make fun with Saddam Hussein jokes ... but you can't make fun of, say, the concentration camps. I think my target was not so much evil, but benign stupidity people doing stupid things without realising or, instead, thinking they were doing good.
Tom Lehrer
#63. 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
#64. I wasn't really a performer by temperament.
Tom Lehrer
#65. 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
#66. 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.
Tom Lehrer
#68. It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year.
Tom Lehrer
#69. 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.
Tom Lehrer
#70. Be it ever so decadent, there's no place like home.
Tom Lehrer
#71. 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.
Tom Lehrer
#72. When someone makes a move Of which we don't approve, Who is it that always intervenes? U.N. and O.A.S., They have their place, I guess, But first send the Marines!
Tom Lehrer
#73. 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!
Tom Lehrer
#74. I think that if people are having trouble communicating with one
another, the least they can do is SHUT UP.
Tom Lehrer
#75. Always predict the worst, and you'll be hailed as a prophet.
Tom Lehrer
#76. Counting in octal is just like counting in decimal, if you don't use your .
Tom Lehrer
#77. I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!
Tom Lehrer
#78. 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
#79. Plagiarize, plagiarize, / Let no man's work evade your eyes, / Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, / Don't shade your eyes, / But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize. / Only be sure to call it research.
Tom Lehrer
#80. 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.
Tom Lehrer
#81. 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
#82. Don't write naughty words on the wall if you can't spell!
Tom Lehrer
#83. Apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?
Tom Lehrer
#84. The poor folks hate the rich folks, and the rich folks hate the poor folks. All of my folks hate all of your folks, it's American as apple pie.
Tom Lehrer
#85. People would go anywhere to see a famous person in the flesh, no matter what they do.
Tom Lehrer
#86. Hark, the Herald Tribune sings, Advertising wondrous things!
Tom Lehrer
#87. Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics/ And the Catholics hate the Protestants/ And the Hindus hate the Muslims/ And everybody hates the Jews.
Tom Lehrer
#88. Don't solicit for your sister, it's not nice. Unless you get a good percentage of her price.
Tom Lehrer
#89. I ache for the touch of your lips dear, but much more for the touch of your whips dear.
Tom Lehrer
#90. I have always found it interesting ... that there are people who regard copyright infringement as a form of flattery.
Tom Lehrer
#91. When correctly viewed, everything is lewd.
Tom Lehrer
#92. They love us everywhere we go. So when in doubt, send the Marines.
Tom Lehrer
#93. Base eight is just like base ten really, if you're missing two fingers.
Tom Lehrer
#94. I don't have the temperament of a performer, and I certainly couldn't do it every night.
Tom Lehrer
#95. Angels we have heard on High Tell us to go out and Buy.
Tom Lehrer
#96. In my youth there were words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can't say 'girl.'
Tom Lehrer
#97. 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
#98. I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity.
Tom Lehrer
#99. Oh we will all fry together when we fry. We'll be french fried potatoes by and by. There will be no more misery When the world is our rotisserie, Yes, we will all fry together when we fry.
Tom Lehrer
#100. 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
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