Tom Lehrer Quotes - Page 3

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.

We are the folk song army, every one of us cares. We all hate poverty, war, and injustice unlike the rest of you squares.

Base eight is just like base ten really, if you're missing two fingers.

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.

But in the new (math) approach, the important thing is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer.

Step up and shake the hand Of someone you can't stand, You can tolerate him if you try!

You can raise welts like nobody else, as we dance to the Masochism Tango.

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

If I see a movie star in the department store buying something, I'll kind of sidle up and see what they're saying, what they look like, how they sound. That's an invasion of privacy.

Don't solicit for your sister, it's not nice. Unless you get a good percentage of her price.

The people who came to hear me perform or to buy my records were not the type who would be offended [by the song 'The Vatican Rag']. But I gather that there were other people who were offended.

I think that if people are having trouble communicating with one another, the least they can do is SHUT UP.

Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

I ache for the touch of your lips dear, but much more for the touch of your whips dear.

The Lord's our shepherd, says the psalm. But just in case, we better get a bomb.

Angels we have heard on High Tell us to go out and Buy.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

In one word he told me the secret of success in mathematics: plagiarize; only be sure always to call it . . . research.

In my youth there were words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can't say 'girl.'

The real issues I don't think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn't ban landmines...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 satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them. And that's not funny....OK, well, if I say that, I might get a shock laugh, but it's not really satire.