John Cleese Quotes

Life is a terminal disease, and it is sexually transmitted.

Political correctness is a bit like a granny, a maiden aunt arriving at a party when everyone's having a good time. And she comes in, they all start sort of buttoning up and becoming self-conscious and behaving properly and then when she leaves, you can have fun again.

The sad thing about true stupidity is that you can do absolutely nothing about it.

Creativity is not the possession of some special talent. It’s about the willingness to play.

A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people.

Nothing will stop you being creative more effectively as the fear of making a mistake.

There are 3 basic differences between we British and you Americans. One, we speak English, and you don't. Two, when we have a "World Championship", we invite teams from other nations. Three, when you meet the British head of State, you only have to get down on one knee.

If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?

All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

I think the problem with people like this is that they are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are.

If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time to be considering alternative strategies.

When you get to my age, and I'm 66 now, you realize that the world is a madhouse and that most people are operating in fantasy anyway. So once you realise that, it doesn't bother you much.

Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.

My views are heretical to people who believe in political correctness.

If you want to know who your friends are, have a major failure.

Don't let anyone tell you what you ought to like.

I would like to do my own eulogy, and then shoot myself and then get in the coffin.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him enter regional distribution codes in data field 97 to facilitate regression analysis on the back end.

No hope for planet at all. But I will be gone before the planet is gone, so it's your problem.

The really good idea is always traceable back quite a long way, often to a not very good idea which sparked off another idea that was only slightly better, which somebody else misunderstood in such a way that they then said something which was really rather interesting.

He who laughs most, learns best.

Aping urbanity, Oozing with vanity, Plump as a manatee, Faking humanity, Intellectual inanity, Journalistic calamity, Fox Noise insanity, You're a profanity, Hannity.

We all operate in two contrasting modes, which might be called open and closed. The open mode is more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more democratic, more playful and more humorous. The closed mode is the tighter, more rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned. Most people, unfortunately spend most of their time in the closed mode.

Too many people confuse being serious with being solemn.

My mum died about three years ago at the age of 101, and just towards the end, as she began to run out of energy, she did actually stop trying to tell me what to do most of the time.