Steve Allen Quotes

One of the nice things about problems is that a good many of them do not exist except in our imaginations.

Ours is a government of checks and balances. The Mafia and crooked businessmen make out checks, and the politicians and other compromised officials improve their bank balances.

Radio is the theater of the mind; television is the theater of the mindless.

Nothing is better than the unintended humor of reality.

Totalitarianism is patriotism institutionalized.

Humor is a social lubricant that helps us get over some of the bad spots.

Civilization itself . . . can easily be swept aside when mob passions are aroused.

Ideas have consequences, and totally erroneous ideas are likely to have destructive consequences.

Without laughter life on our planet would be intolerable. So important is laughter to us that humanity highly rewards members of one of the most unusual professions on earth, those who make a living by inducing laughter in others. This is very strange if you stop to think of it: that otherwise sane and responsible citizens should devote their professional energies to causing others to make sharp, explosive barking-like exhalations.

If there is a God, the phrase that must disgust him is - holy war.

Religious believers of the world, you are free to continue to debate the simple, narrow question that divides you from atheists, but you have no right, in so doing, to treat the Humanists of the world with contempt. You owe them a deep debt of gratitude, for not only have they shed much light on a naturally dark world but they have very probably helped civilize your own specific religion.

Thousands of years ago only Christ could walk on the water. Today anybody can do it; you just step on the garbage.

Millions of Germans had absolute faith in Hitler. Millions of Russians had faith in Stalin. Millions of Chinese had faith in Mao. Billions have had faith in imaginary gods.

If the Old Testament were a reliable guide in the matter of capital punishment, half the people in the United States would have to be killed tomorrow.

In a rational society we would want our presidents to be teachers. In our actual society we insist they be cheerleaders.

Asthma doesn't seem to bother me any more unless I'm around cigars or dogs. The thing that would bother me most would be a dog smoking a cigar.

Physical fitness is in. I recently had a physical fit myself.

Everybody is somewhere.

The problem is that once the untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a religious philosophy - and it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational

There is scarcely a page of the Bible on which an open mind does not perceive a contradiction, an unlikely story, an obvious error, an historical impossibility of one sort or another.

Laughter would appear to be a physical reflex, although even if it is, this still leaves unanswered the question of why the human response to humor is a convulsive spasm of the respiratory mechanism rather than a crossing of the eyes or a waving of the arms.

I cannot see how it can be argued that one should speak in tones of reverence and awe about the alleged divine instruction-in Psalms-to grab the defenseless bodies of innocent infants and dash their brains out against the nearest rocks or walls.

This is The Tonight Show. I can't tell you too much about it, other than the fact that this program is going to go on forever.

...we are entitled to make almost any reasonable assumption, but should resist making conclusions until evidence requires that we do so.

Dark energy is perhaps the biggest mystery in physics.