Johnny Carson Quotes

I know a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up to the day he killed himself.

When a comic becomes enamored with his own views and foists them off on the public in a polemic way, he loses not only his sense of humor but his value as a humorist.

Married men live longer than single men. But married men are a lot more willing to die.

Democracy is buying a big house you can't afford with money you don't have to impress people you wish were dead.

Some sad news from Australia... the inventor of the boomerang grenade died today.

Despite the fact that computer speeds are measured in nanoseconds and picoseconds - one billionth and one trillionth of a second, respectively - the smallest interval of time known to man is that which occurs in Manhattan between the traffic signal turning green and the taxi driver behind you blowing his horn.

Happiness is having a rare steak, a bottle of whiskey, and a dog to eat the rare steak.

If variety is the spice of life, marriage is the big can of leftover Spam.

Never ask your wife if she still hears from her old pimp.

Happiness is your dentist telling you it won't hurt and then having him catch his hand in the drill.

I was so naive as a kid I used to sneak behind the barn and do nothing.

Happiness is discovering the prune juice your doctor ordered you to drink has fermented.

For days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off.

Last night, it was so cold, the flashers in New York were only describing themselves.

The worst gift is a fruitcake. There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other.

If life was fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.

Happiness is.....finding two olives in your martini when youre hungry.

I loved the towns I grew up in as a boy, and after I became a celebrity, I went back several times. I would have had the time of my life seeing the old places and the old faces again, but the attitude of those same people was, "I guess you're so big we bore you now."

Happiness is seeing your son drafted the same day he's been accepted to an expensive college.

When turkeys mate they think of swans.

If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners.

In Hollywood if you don't have a shrink, people think you're crazy.

Anytime four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a bank robbery has just taken place.

Did you know Richard Nixon is the only president whose formal portrait was painted by a police sketch artist?

Democracy means that anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn't grow up can be vice president.

New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.

Happiness is sitting down to watch some slides of your neighbor's vacation and finding out that he spent two weeks in a nudist colony.

The best way to thaw a frozen turkey? Blow in it's ear.

What's all this fuss about plutonium? How can something named after a Disney character be dangerous?

A two-pound turkey and a fifty-pound cranberry-that's Thanksgiving dinner at Three Mile Island.

It was so hot today that Burger King was singing, "if you want it your way, cook it yourself".

The difference between divorce and legal separation is that legal separation gives a husband time to hide his money.

Democracy is buying a big house you can't afford with money you don't have to impress people you wish were dead. And, unlike communism, democracy does not mean having just one ineffective political party; it means having two ineffective political parties.

I have no use for eight houses, 88 cars and 500 suits.

I can't eat but one steak at a time. I don't want but one woman. It's silly to have as one's sole object in life just making money, accumulating wealth.

The only thing money gives you is the freedom of not worrying about money.

The vast majority of us don't want to face the fact that we're in the middle of a sweeping social revolution. In sex. In spiritual values. In opposition to wars no one wants. In opposition to government big-brotherhood. In civil rights. In basic human goals. They're all facets of a general upheaval.

Money gives me just one big thing that's really important, and that's the freedom of not having to worry about money.

I would like to say, for the record, that I am in favor of using more American Indians and other minorities in motion pictures, I am against polluting the oceans of the world, I am for every nationality having its own homeland, I am against whacking baby seals on the head, and I am for saving the whales.

I hear that whenever someone in the White House tells a lie, Nixon gets a royalty.

I've worked ever since I was a kid with a two-bit kit of magic tricks trying to improve my skills at entertaining whatever public I had - and to make myself ready, whenever the breaks came, to entertain a wider and more demanding public.

Pie throwing is kind of a lost art, and although it may be a rather rudimentary, burlesque humor, there's something inherently funny about taking a pie in the face, under the right conditions.

I wouldn't have the slightest interest in running for public office.

I'd rather make jokes about politicians than become one of them.

I don't run with anybody's herd. I don't like crowds. I don't like going to fancy places. I don't like the whole nightclub scene. Cocktail parties drive me mad. So I do my job and I stay away from the rest of it.

I never analyze it. Analyzing it would just be a waste of time. I just go out and do it.

If God didn't want man to hunt, He wouldn't have given us plaid shirts.

Happiness is seeing the muscular lifeguard all the girls were admiring leave the beach hand in hand with another muscular lifeguard.

I feel the one sensible thing you can do is try to live in a way that pleases you. If you don't hurt anybody else, what you do is your own business.

There was this billy goat at a movie studio who found and ate a can of film.

When a nanny asked him how he liked it, he said, "It was all right but I liked the book better."

From the time I was a little kid, I was always shy.

Performing was when I was outgoing. So I guess I am a loner. I get claustrophobia if a lot of people are around.