Top 182 Quotes & Sayings by Alan Alda
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American actor Alan Alda.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
I have a strong preference for being alive.
If I can't get the girl, at least give me more money.
The meaning of life is life.
The President never intends to get into any kind of war situation. He gets carried away by events.
I've sat looking down into a volcano that could blow at any moment; I've helped catch a shark and several rattlesnakes; I let a tarantula walk across my hand, and I ate rat soup.
Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.
I'm greedy for that satisfaction of doing something hard and knowing that, even though I was afraid I couldn't do it, that somehow I can deliver.
I come armed with a really good ignorance. I don't strive toward ignorance. I come by it naturally.
I was a child, and my mother was psychotic. She loved me, but I didn't really feel I had a mother. And when you live with somebody who is paranoid and thinks you're trying to kill them all the time, you tend to feel a little betrayed.
I think it's important for scientists to speak in their own voices and not just be mediated by journalists or others speaking for them.
It makes it fun. When an actor plays a character, you want what that character wants. Otherwise it doesn't look authentic. So I really want to defeat Jimmy - I mean Jimmy as the character.
When I was about ten years old, I gave my teacher an April Fool's sandwich, which had a dead goldfish in it.
It's really clear to me that you can't hang onto something longer than its time. Ideas lose certain freshness, ideas have a shelf life, and sometimes they have to be replaced by other ideas.
The idea that the brain is not fully formed until you are almost 30 years old has already been introduced, and the Supreme Court already has based two rulings on it.
When does she do all this thinking? We're together all the time but she thinks deeply about things and with feeling and she can remember the facts. We've been married 48 years.
I'm condemned by some inner compulsion to think about the daily rituals of my life. I have a low grade fever for improving myself in many ways, including everyday tasks.
Awards shows mainly publicize the people giving the awards.
Why would you give money to somebody whose work you don't understand?
In 2003, I almost died of an intestinal blockage when I was on a mountain in Chile, filming a segment for 'Scientific American Frontiers.'
Awards can give you a tremendous amount of encouragement to keep getting better, no matter how young or old you are.
It's too bad I'm not as wonderful a person as people say I am, because the world could use a few people like that.
I find myself going to places where I really have no business, speaking to these people in a whole other field that I have no extensive knowledge of. But I do it very often because it scares me.
Almost everybody that's well-known gets tagged with a nickname.
Begin challenging your assumptions. Your assumptions are the windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile or the light won't come in.
I love oatmeal. To me, it's not boring. I agree that ordinary oatmeal is very boring, but not the steel-cut Irish kind - the kind that pops in your mouth when you bite into it in little glorious bursts like a sort of gummy champagne.
You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.
I used to not want to die in any way but in my sleep when I was a young man. I'd like to die awake now, if possible, with people around me who love me.
As an artist, as an actor, as a writer, you have to use what's personal to you. You have to be personal about your work; otherwise, it doesn't ring true.
Be fair with others, but then keep after them until they're fair with you.
You wouldn't want to be called a sell-out by selling a product. Selling out was frowned on, whereas now you can major in it at business school.
If scientists can't communicate with the public, with policy makers, with one another, the future is going to be held back. We're not going to have the future that we could have.
I used to be a Catholic. I left because I object to conversion by concussion. If you don't agree with what they teach, you get clobbered over the head until you do. All that does is change the shape of the head.
Marie Curie is my hero. Few people have accomplished something so rare - changing science. And as hard as that is, she had to do it against the tide of the culture at the time - the prejudice against her as a foreigner, because she was born in Poland and worked in France. And the prejudice against her as a woman.
'Never Have Your Dog Stuffed' is really advice to myself, a reminder to myself not to avoid change or uncertainty, but to go with it, to surf into change.
Here's my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they're fair with you.
On the stage, the characters express themselves more through words than images. So the arguments of the characters and the tension between characters - words have to be used to express that, and I love that about theater.
I made my first stage appearance when I was 6 months old.
Backstage life is terrific training for an actor, seeing shows from the wings.
Whenever I think of how much pleasure I have interviewing scientists, I remember that they're having the real fun in actually being able to do the science.
Really top-notch directors, I've often worked with them just to see how they work.
No, I never thought about my image. It interests me that there are people who do, that they seem to be methodical about it.
After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can't bring back anything to life.
If scientists could communicate more in their own voices - in a familiar tone, with a less specialized vocabulary - would a wide range of people understand them better? Would their work be better understood by the general public, policy-makers, funders, and, even in some cases, other scientists?
Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in while, or the light won't come in.
Listening is being able to be changed by the other person.
Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don't leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.
It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It's only necessary to be rich.
My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.
Usually, comedy shows only influence other comedy shows. 'M*A*S*H' is one of the few comedies that influenced dramatic shows as well.
Some of the greatest things, as I understand, they have come about by serendipity, the greatest discoveries.
I think most people are interested in our origins; once we understand, it might be easier to become the people we'd like to be. Or, better, become the people we think we already are.
I've never tried to manipulate my image.
I've been nominated twice before as actor in a leading part. Now I'm nominated as actor in a supporting part. If I don't win, I'll just wait until I'm nominated for being in the theater during the show. Do they have one like that?
I don't miss directing at all, and I don't miss screenwriting either because somebody's always telling you to do something different.
What I can't completely understand is most other people's fascination with what the famous among us do with their lips and the rest of their bodies. Why do ordinary people become the target of this curiosity simply by virtue of the fact that other people recognise their names and faces but know almost nothing else about them?
Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been.
I've been lucky enough to live through all the things that are supposed to give meaning to our lives, like parenting, grandparenting, art, celebrity. All these things you expect meaning to come from, and sometimes it comes when you're not expecting it.
I was always interested in figuring things out. I'd do experiments, like combining things I found around the house to see what would happen if I put them together.
If two scientists are giving their papers at a symposium, and one of them is just naturally better at talking to the public or talking to a group of people, that scientist is liable to get more attention - in fact, I'm told that they do get more attention - than the one who's a little more stiff about it. Well, that's not good for science.
You can't be aware of everything. You'd fall down the stairs if you were aware of every intricate thing involved in going down stairs.
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