Tom Lehrer Quotes That Are humorous, satirical and witty

Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down ? That's not my department.

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

I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!

I feel that if a person has problems communicating the very least he can do is to shut up.

"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

" It's always seemed to me that this is precisely the sort of dynamic, positive thinking that we so desperately need today in these trying times of crisis and universal brouhaha.

I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity.

Alas, irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness, at least in the so-called mass media. What we have now - to quote myself at my most pretentious - is a nimiety of scurrility with a concomitant exiguity of taste.

If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.

Soon we'll be out amid the cold world's strife.

Soon we'll be sliding down the razor blade of life. But as we go our sordid sep'rate ways, We shall ne'er forget thee, thou golden college days. Hearts full of youth, Hearts full of truth, Six parts gin to one part vermouth.

Irreverence is easy - whats hard is wit.

I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.

Be prepared, and be careful not to do your good deeds when there's no one watching you.

I wish people that have trouble communicating would just shut up!

Plagiarize! Plagiarize, Let no one else's work evade your eyes, Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, So don't shade your eyes, But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize... Only be sure always to call it please "research".

If you asked me to write a rock song or a rap song, I couldn't do it because they're not in my fingers.

I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up.

As for language, almost everything goes now.

That is not to say that verbal taboos have disappeared, but merely that they have shifted somewhat. In my youth, for example, there were certain words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can say them, but you can't say 'girl'.

Filth, I'm glad to say, is in the mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, everything is lewd.

For there is surely nothing more beautiful in this world than the sight of a lone man facing single-handedly a half a ton of angry pot roast!

The civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it, owing to the nature of the laws, as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on. But we know what's really involved, dirty books are fun. That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that.

On Christmas day you can't get sore, your fellow man you must adore.

There's time to cheat him all the more the other three hundred and sixty-four

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

In one word he told me the secret of success in mathematics: plagiarize;

only be sure always to call it . . . research.

When someone makes a move Of which we don't approve, Who is it that always intervenes? U.N. and O.A.S., They have their place, I guess, But first send the Marines!

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

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.

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

I have always found it interesting... that there are people who regard copyright infringement as a form of flattery.

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

All books can be indecent books, though recent books are bolder. For filth, I'm glad to say, is in the mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, everything is lewd. I could tell you things about Peter Pan and the Wizard of OZ, there's a dirty old man!

Hark, the Herald Tribune sings, Advertising wondrous things!

Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air!

There's ten stuffed heads in my trophy room right now, two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow.

I find enough mystery in mathematics to satisfy my spiritual needs. I think, for example, that pi is mysterious enough (don't get me started!) without having to worry about God. Or if pi isn't enough, how about fractals? or quantum mechanics?

No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has "The Truth". To be an atheist is almost as arrogant as to be a fundamentalist. But then again, I can get pretty arrogant.

I always like to make explicit the fact that before I went off not too long ago to fight in the trenches, I was a mathematician by profession. I don't like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living. I mean, it isn't as though I had to do this, you know, I could be making, oh, three thousand dollars a year just teaching.

I'm very proud of myself on my, whatever the literacy is, I'm pretentious, totally pretentious. I like to say 'hmm', for example.

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.

The poor folks hate the rich folks, and the rich folks hate the poor folks. All of my folks hate all of your folks, it's American as apple pie.

Laughter is involuntary. If it's funny you laugh.

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

An actress must never lose her ego - without it she has no talent.

From the three, you then use one to make eight ones. You add those ones to the three, and you get one-three base eight, or, in other words, In base ten you have eleven, and you take away seven. And seven from eleven is four. Now go back to the sixty-fours, you're left with two.

It is a sobering thought, that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years.

Comedy is very important. For one thing, it keeps you sane. But it's not really a conversion. I mean, it's marginally a conversion, because if people tune in or go to a nightclub or even watch television, and hear that a lot of other people are laughing at something you thought was not funny, at least it'll force you to reconsider.

You can make fun with Saddam Hussein jokes ... but you can't make fun of, say, the concentration camps. I think my target was not so much evil, but benign stupidity people doing stupid things without realising or, instead, thinking they were doing good.

I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record.

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

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