George Carlin Quotes

“Shopping and buying and getting and having comprise the Great American Addiction. No one is immune. When the underclass riots in this country they don't kill policemen and politicians, they steal merchandise. How embarrassing.”

“I feel sorry for confetti. Its useful life lasts about two seconds. And it can never be used again.”

“Laugh often, long and loud. Laugh until you gasp for breath.”

“Why don't sheep shrink when it rains?”

“If you have a legal problem, guess how you determine whether or not you need a lawyer. You see a lawyer. Isn't that weird?”

“It's all bullshit, folks and it's bad for ya.”

“If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.”

“To me, fast food is when a cheetah eats an antelope.”

“I'm certainly a skeptic. I always quibble with people.”

“Abraham Maslow said that the fully realized person transcends his local group and identifies with the species. But the election of Ronald Reagan might've been the beginning of my giving up on my species. Because it was absurd. To this day it remains absurd. More than absurd, it was frightening: it represented the rise to supremacy of darkness, the ascendancy of ignorance.”

“As it stands right now, I lead Richard Pryor in heart attacks, two to one. However, Richard still leads me, one to nothing, in burning yourself up.”

“Anger is a handy term and words are tricky, as we know. What one man perceives as anger, another person - in my case the deliverer of material - is, "Don't you see it, don't you see how badly you're doing?" It's like shaking a child - which you're not supposed to do.”

“It's the American view that everything has to keep climbing: productivity, profits, even comedy.”

“So far, this is the oldest I've been.”

“Why do they bother with a suicide watch when someone is on death row? "Keep an eye on this guy. We're gonna kill him, and we don't want him to hurt himself."”

“Most of the note-taking happens while I'm watching television. It's a broad window on the world, and a lot of things are already established in my mind as things I say, things that I'm interested in, things that are fodder for my [stand-up] machine. And when I see something that relates to one of them, I know it instantly and if it's a further exaggeration and a further addition, or an exception - if it plays into furthering my purpose, I jot it down.”

“Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.”

“The more syllables a euphemism has, the further divorced from reality it is.”

“Honesty may be the best policy, but it's important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.”

“The mayfly lives only one day. And sometimes it rains.”

“Language is the most elementary aspect to our humanness, probably. In addition to that, it's the embodiment, it's the apotheosis of the human experience, it's the way we summarize ourselves.”

“How can it be a spy satellite if they announce on television that it's a spy satellite?”

“You know what I like about the American form of government? They've worked things out so that you're never far from a 7-Eleven.”

“We've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul.”

“Comedy, although it is not one of the fine arts - it's a vulgar art, it's one of the people's arts, it's the spoken word, the writing that goes into it is an art form - it's certainly artistry.”