Mort Sahl Quotes

#1. Mort Sahl, while attending a preview of Otto Preminger's film Exodus, stood up and called out, Otto, let my people go!

Mort Sahl

#2. W. Kamau Bell is in the vanguard of a new era of American comedy for an unsettling, troubling, and strangely hopeful time. Firmly in the fearless tradition of Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, & Chris Rock. Comedy as common sense purged of the absurd hypocrisy that is Our America.

Vernon Reid

#3. When I first started out, 'Time' magazine did an article on what it called 'the sick comics,' and they were myself, Shelley Berman, Nichols & May, Jonathan Winters, Lenny Bruce, and Mort Sahl. We were considered 'sick.'

Bob Newhart

#4. We all know that America is the worst country in the world, except for all the others.

Mort Sahl

#5. People tell me there are a lot of guys like me, which doesn't explain why I'm lonely.

Mort Sahl

#6. Television is never more false than when it's openly sincere.

Mort Sahl

#7. Remember that no matter how selfish, how cruel, how unfeeling you have been today, every time you take a breath, you make a flower happy.

Mort Sahl

#8. Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen.

Mort Sahl

#9. We would have broken up except for the children. Who were the children? Well, she and I were.

Mort Sahl

#10. I don't believe in good people and bad people. I believe in the better parts of people.

Mort Sahl

#11. There's so much Botox around now that you can't tell when a Jewish girl is angry!

Mort Sahl

#12. The New York Times is the official leak of the State Department.

Mort Sahl

#13. When Obama ran, he said, We can change the world! The world: can you change it back?!

Mort Sahl

#14. A Yuppie is someone who believes it's courageous to eat in a restaurant that hasn't been reviewed yet.

Mort Sahl

#15. I don't think crucifixion is the answer. I believe in the resurrection. I like that part of the story.

Mort Sahl

#16. Every time the Russians throw an American in jail, the Committee throws an American in jail to get even.

Mort Sahl

#17. Washington couldn't tell a lie, Nixon couldn't tell the truth, and Reagan couldn't tell the difference.

Mort Sahl

#18. Professional comedians, surprisingly, have a lack of humor. They're insensitive to the insanity of our times.

Mort Sahl

#19. A political satirist's job is to draw blood. I'm not so much interested in politics as I am in overthrowing the government.

Mort Sahl

#20. If you maintain a consistent political position long enough, you'll eventually be accused of treason.

Mort Sahl

#21. When people write comedy from neutrality, it just gets kind of silly.

Mort Sahl

#22. We claim we believe in compassion, which is an abstract, and when it's personified we discredit the man

Mort Sahl

#23. I'm a radical, and I always have been.

Mort Sahl

#24. If you were the only person left on the planet, I would have to attack you. That's my job.

Mort Sahl

#25. You haven't lived until you've died in California

Mort Sahl

#26. One thing about being narrow-minded: you'll never be lonely.

Mort Sahl

#27. A conservative is someone who believes in reform. But not now.

Mort Sahl

#28. You don't know what you think unless you say it.

Mort Sahl

#29. Hillary's explanation of the Libyan action to Congress was so good, I wonder who explained it to her?

Mort Sahl

#30. You know me, I love lost causes.

Mort Sahl

#31. That feeling of hopelessness only serves your masters.

Mort Sahl

#32. I used to go to two movies every week for the Saturday matinee when I was a kid.

Mort Sahl

#33. I didn't think that anything is beyond humor - not profane humor, but a good, honest approach to humor.

Mort Sahl

#34. Nixon's the kind of guy that if you were drowning fifty feet off shore, he'd throw you a thirty foot rope. Then Kissinger would go on TV the next night and say that the President had met you more than half-way.

Mort Sahl

#35. I'm not a liberal, I'm a radical!

Mort Sahl

#36. I went to computer class with my Dell and I was bullied by a guy with a Mac.

Mort Sahl

#37. I found people looked better when they laughed

Mort Sahl

#38. The fact is that you can't have a good relationship with a girl who hasn't settled things with her father.

Mort Sahl

#39. There were four million people in the American Colonies and we had Jefferson and Franklin. Now we have over 200 million and the two top guys are Clinton and Dole. What can you draw from this? Darwin was wrong!

Mort Sahl

#40. I took benzedrine - I got clairvoyance. With benzedrine you can have a very wide view of the world, like you can decide the destiny of man and other pressing problems, such as which is the left sock?

Mort Sahl

#41. Remember when movies were just good or bad, before auteurs, film festivals, and guys from USC who were the first to shoot underwater?

Mort Sahl

#42. Most people past college age are not atheists. It's too hard to be in society, for one thing. Because you don't get any days off. And if you're an agnostic you don't know whether you get them off or not.

Mort Sahl

#43. My whole life is a movie. It's just that there are no dissolves. I have to live every agonizing moment of it. My life needs editing.

Mort Sahl

#44. If you can't join them, beat them.

Mort Sahl

#45. In the forties, to get a girl you had to be a GI or a jock. In the fifties, to get a girl you had to be Jewish. In the sixties, to get a girl you had to be black. In the seventies, to get a girl you've got to be a girl.

Mort Sahl

#46. I've arranged with my executor to be buried in Chicago. Because when I die, I want to still remain active politically.

Mort Sahl

#47. There's a danger our fiscal bankruptcy might overtake our moral bankruptcy.

Mort Sahl

#48. Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. If he ran unopposed he would have lost.

Mort Sahl

#49. A conservative doesn't want anything to happen for the first time; a liberal feels it should happen, but not now.

Mort Sahl

#50. This matter of two sides to every question is bad logic and bad practice: sometimes there are no sides; sometimes there are a hundred.

Mort Sahl

#51. I'm for capital punishment. You've got to execute people. How else are they going to learn?

Mort Sahl

#52. Women want their men to be cops. They want you to punish them and tell them what the limits are. The only thing that women hate worse from a man than being slapped is when you get on your knees and say you're sorry.

Mort Sahl

#53. New book on Malcolm X says we don't know how he was killed. Want to bring in the FBI. Maybe they were in already.

Mort Sahl

#54. Obama is running again for spite.

Mort Sahl

#55. I never met a man I didn't like until I met Will Rogers.

Mort Sahl

#56. Obama says his recreation consists of reading the Constitution ... looking for a loophole.

Mort Sahl

#57. Now that Obama is at war in a 3rd country, does that mean he has to give back his Nobel Peace Prize?

Mort Sahl

#58. There are Russian spies here now. And if we're lucky, they'll steal some of our secrets and they'll be two years behind.

Mort Sahl

#59. I don't think fascism is dying for.

Mort Sahl

#60. I made the mistake early in my career, when I moved to Hollywood, of being attracted to actresses. I used to go out exclusively with actresses and other female impersonators.

Mort Sahl

#61. Bush is the face on the can. But who canned that soup?

Mort Sahl

#62. The bravest thing that men do is love women.

Mort Sahl

#63. The beat generation is a coffeehouse full of people expectantly looking at their watches waiting for the beat generation to come on. *1958

Mort Sahl

#64. If someone were to ask me for a short cut to sensuality, I would suggest he go shopping for a used 427 Shelby-Cobra. But it is only fair to warn you that of the 300 guys who switched to them in 1966, only two went back to women.

Mort Sahl

#65. The distance between taking social action and having the knowledge is as wide as the mouth of the Mississippi.

Mort Sahl

#66. Everything I tell you is true, but this is factual.

Mort Sahl

#67. I watched Ken Burns' Civil War series on PBS. My favorite segment is when Bob Hope entertains the troops at Gettysburg.

Mort Sahl

#68. My life needs editing.

Mort Sahl

#69. Those who the gods would make rich and famous on TV, they first drive mad.

Mort Sahl

#70. Will Rogers ... used to come out with a newspaper and pretend he was a
yokel criticizing the intellectuals who ran the government. I come out with
a newspaper and pretend I'm an intellectual making fun of the yokels
running the government.

Mort Sahl

#71. You know what I want you to do? I want you to blow out the candle and curse the darkness.

Mort Sahl

#72. Obama said he went to Libya because of his conscience. Did anyone ever wrestle with his conscience and lose?

Mort Sahl