Top 100 Lehrer Quotes
#1. As long as you give my friend Jonah Lehrer a free pizza, I'll write a song about your restaurant.
Bob Dylan
#2. Jonah Lehrer is one of the most talented explainers of science that we've got. What a pleasure it is to follow his investigation of creativity and its sources. Imagine is his best book yet.
Joshua Foer
#3. I'll be selling tickets for my next tour exclusively through Jonah Lehrer. Make sure to pay cash.
Bob Dylan
#4. Tom Lehrer line - "Life is like a sewer: What you get out of it depends on what you put into it"112 - and a promise that if they put real effort into the exercises, he will help them.
Eric Schmidt
#5. If you don't know Tom Lehrer, you should - in addition to being a classical pianist, mathematician, songwriter, satirist, researcher at Los Alamos and, he claims, inventor of the Jell-O shot, he is just delightfully funny and graceful.
Rachel Sklar
#6. Mr. Lehrer's muse is not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste.
The New York Times
#7. In A Life In Books, author and graphic design visionary Warren Lehrer crafts a vivid kaleidoscopic odyssey that frames one man's life through not one, but one hundred different books - and book jackets ... An unmistakably modern evocation of the illuminated manuscript.
Jessica Helfand
#8. Any real Bob Dylan fan would sleep with Jonah Lehrer.
Bob Dylan
#9. I'm a good friend of Jonah Lehrer's. You should go on a date with him.
Bob Dylan
#10. You want to know about creativity? Just go out and buy that book Imagine by Jonah Lehrer. It's only $29.00 in hardcover.
Bob Dylan
#11. You can raise welts like nobody else, as we dance to the Masochism Tango.
Tom Lehrer
#12. Cities force us to interact with strangers and with the strange. They pry the mind open. And that is why they are the idea that has unleashed so many of our new ideas.
Jonah Lehrer
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Bad weather always looks worse through a window.
Tom Lehrer
#16. I have great faith in the intelligence of the American viewer and reader to put two and two together and come up with four.
Jim Lehrer
#17. I have no reason to lie and every reason not to. If I do lie, I will be prosecuted.
Jim Lehrer
#18. Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air!
Tom Lehrer
#19. There's ten stuffed heads in my trophy room right now, two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow.
Tom Lehrer
#20. Suffering through his classes, the young Igor steeped himself in angst. He would later describe his childhood as 'a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
Jonah Lehrer
#21. The best way to solve a problem? Try explaining it to somebody outside your field.
Jonah Lehrer
#23. I like Jon Stewart. He's not as obnoxious as Dennis Miller, whom I really can't stand.
Tom Lehrer
#24. The inconsistency of genius is a consistent theme of creativity.
Jonah Lehrer
#25. 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
#26. We have increasingly fewer and fewer journalists who have any military experience and understand what life is like in the military and in combat.
Jim Lehrer
#27. Children can't help but create: they need to put their mind on the page, they want to paint, to sculpt, to write short stories.
Jonah Lehrer
#28. ...Prions violate most of biology's sacred rules. They are one of those annoying reminders of how much we don't know.
Jonah Lehrer
#29. 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
#30. I came from a family of Marines into the family of Marines.
Jim Lehrer
#31. 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
#32. If we don't have an informed electorate we don't have a democracy. So I don't care how people get the information, as long as they get it. I'm just doing it my particular way and I feel lucky I can do it the way I want to do it.
Jim Lehrer
#33. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It's a skill.
Jonah Lehrer
#34. For too long, we've assumed that there is a single template for human nature, which is why we diagnose most deviations as disorders. But the reality is that there are many different kinds of minds. And that's a very good thing.
Jonah Lehrer
#35. Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way.
Tom Lehrer
#36. The answer will only arrive after we stop looking for it.
Jonah Lehrer
#37. If the hoods don't get you, the monoxide will.
Tom Lehrer
#38. The benefit of such horizontal interactions - people sharing knowledge across fields - is that it encourages conceptual blending, which is an extremely important part of the insight process.
Jonah Lehrer
#39. Everyone should get their news however they want to and in whatever form they want. I'm not going to sit back in judgment of other people and the way they do it.
Jim Lehrer
#40. There's always a germ of truth in just about everything.
Jim Lehrer
#41. On a daily basis there are some huge ones that are, sure, from time to time, but it is helping the reader sort through all this sort of gray stuff out there.
Jim Lehrer
#42. 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
#43. The death rate among Marines in Iraq has been more than double that of the other services.
Jim Lehrer
#44. 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
#45. Unless you experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong, your brain will never revise its models. Before your neurons can succeed, they must repeatedly fail. There are no shortcuts for this painstaking process.
Jonah Lehrer
#46. An actress must never lose her ego - without it she has no talent.
Tom Lehrer
#47. 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
#48. The shouting and opinion and jokes don't exist if there isn't first a story.
Jim Lehrer
#49. Most of the stories I have covered in 45 years have been gray stories.
Jim Lehrer
#50. When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art.
Jonah Lehrer
#51. 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
#52. As I say, I'm a discourse advocate. What form it comes is less important to me than the fact that there is discourse.
Jim Lehrer
#53. When you get to fifty-two food becomes more important than sex.
Tom Lehrer
#54. In fact, most of us see perseverance as a distinctly uncreative approach, the sort of strategy that people with mediocre ideas are forced to rely on.
Jonah Lehrer
#55. 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
#56. My writing is extremely important, so I write every day. I just enjoy it. I get a kick out of it.
Jim Lehrer
#57. Irreverence is easy - what's hard is wit.
Tom Lehrer
#58. 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
#60. I'm not interested in promoting myself or revealing to total strangers anything about me. That's not my job.
Tom Lehrer
#61. 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
#63. People can get their news any way they want. What I love about what's happened is that there are so many different avenues, there are so many different outlets, so many different ways to debate and discuss and to inquire about any given news story.
Jim Lehrer
#64. In fact, the only way to remain creative over time
to not be undone by our expertise
is to experiment with ignorance, to stare at things we don't fully understand.
Jonah Lehrer
#65. Harlow would later write, If monkeys have taught us anything, it's that you've got to learn how to love before you learn how to live.
Jonah Lehrer
#66. If people want bells and whistles and all of that, there are bells and whistles available. If they don't want bells and whistles there are places to go where they are not available.
Jim Lehrer
#67. Expertise is simply the wisdom that emerges from cellular error. Mistakes aren't things to be discouraged. On the contrary, they should be cultivated and carefully investigated.
Jonah Lehrer
#68. You can't be satirical and not be offensive to somebody.
Tom Lehrer
#69. In television there are only about 12 people who do what I do.
Jim Lehrer
#71. New ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.
Jonah Lehrer
#72. 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
#73. Most of the gaffes I've made have not been funny - they've been stupid.
Jim Lehrer
#74. 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
#75. In order to reduce the deficit, there has to be revenue in addition to cuts.
Jim Lehrer
#76. My own view, there is a need for and a demonstrated need for more journalism now than there ever has been.
Jim Lehrer
#77. 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
#78. Well, you ask a silly question, and you get a silly answer.
Tom Lehrer
#79. Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.
Tom Lehrer
#80. 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
#81. Trusting one's emotions requires constant vigilance; intelligent intuition is the result of deliberate practice.
Jonah Lehrer
#82. I told the truth about steroids and human growth hormone. I injected those drugs into the body of Roger Clemens at his direction.
Unfortunately, Roger has denied this and has led a full-court attack on my credibility
Jim Lehrer
#83. Creativity is a spark. It can be excruciating when we're rubbing two rocks together and getting nothing. And it can be intensely satisfying when the flame catches and a new idea sweeps around the world.
Jonah Lehrer
#84. I'm a journalist and that's what I do.
Jim Lehrer
#85. 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
#86. If a person feels he can't communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.
Tom Lehrer
#87. 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
#88. The Lord's our shepherd, says the psalm. But just in case, we better get a bomb.
Tom Lehrer
#89. If you're trying to be more creative, one of the most important things you can do is increase the volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed.
Jonah Lehrer
#90. San Francisco is a city of twenty-something millionaire white kids named Doug.
Tom Lehrer
#91. In one word he told me the secret of success in mathematics: plagiarize; only be sure always to call it ... research.
Tom Lehrer
#92. Laughter is involuntary. If it's funny you laugh.
Tom Lehrer
#93. Every creative story is different. And every creative story is the same. There was nothing. Now there is something. It's almost like magic.
Jonah Lehrer
#94. Design is the conscious imposition of meaningful order.
Jonah Lehrer
#95. 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
#96. Step up and shake the hand Of someone you can't stand, You can tolerate him if you try!
Tom Lehrer
#97. 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
#98. 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
#100. Everything is so weird in politics that it's very hard to be funny about it, I think.
Tom Lehrer
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