Top 98 Quotes & Sayings by Fred Allen - Page 2

I'd rather have two girls at seventeen than one at thirty-four.

A comedian who starts talking to himself becomes his own audience. This is fatal.

Television is a triumph of equipment over people.

When Jack Benny plays the violin, it sounds as though the strings are still in the cat.

A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 AM and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 PM to make this molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished before lunch.

On ships they call them barnacles; in business they attach themselves to desks and are called vice presidents.

The S.S. Sierra was a ten-thousand-ton vessel. Today, lifeboats bigger than the Sierra are found on the Queen Mary and other luxury liners.

Hush, little bright line, don’t you cry You’ll be a cliché by and by.

I'm a little hoarse tonight. I've been living in Chicago for the past two months, and you know how it is, yelling for help on the way home every night. Things are so tough in Chicago that at Easter time, for bunnies the little kids use porcupines.

He dreamed he was eating shredded wheat and woke up to find the mattress half gone.

I was just working in the shop and all of a sudden something just triggered in me, and I started shaking. And then I walked back into the house and my wife asked, 'What's the matter?' And I said, 'I don't feel good.' And tears, uncontrollable tears, was coming out of my eyes and she says, 'What's the matter?' And I told her. I said, 'I just thought about that execution that I did two days ago, and everybody else's that I was involved in.' And what it was, something triggered within, and it just, everybody - all of these executions all sprung forward.

Three million frogs' legs are served in Paris - daily. Nobody knows what became of the rest of the frogs.

English coffee tastes like water that has been squeezed out of a wet sleeve.

She used to be a teacher but she has no class now.

It was once rumored that fledgling executives walked around their offices backwards so they wouldn't have to face an issue.

Father Time is the make-up man responsible for the physical changes that determine the parts the average actor is to play.

With the advance of refrigeration, I hope that along with the frozen foods someday we will have frozen conversation. A person will be able to keep a frozen promise indefinitely.

He has no idea what it was like to grow up in the South, where you had to hold your head down.

In show business, more showgirls are kept than promises.

Cocktail party: A gathering held to enable forty people to talk about themselves at the same time. The man who remains after the liquor is gone is the host.

There are two kinds of jokes - funny jokes and Jack Benny jokes.

I'm going to Boston to see my doctor. He's a very sick man.

Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in a gnat's navel with room left over for two caraway seeds and an agent's heart.

After quitting radio I was able to live on the money I saved on aspirins.

Success is like dealing with your kid or teaching your wife to drive. Sooner or later you'll end up in the police station.

The average vice-president is a form of executive fungus that attaches itself to a desk. On a boat this growth would be called a barnacle.

He's so small, he's a waste of skin.

He always had a chip on his shoulder that he was ready to use to kindle an argument.

Everywhere outside New York City is Bridgeport, Connecticut.

My agent gets 10 percent of everything I get, except the blinding headaches.

All that the comedian has to show for his years of work and aggravation is the echo of forgotten laughter.

Radio is called a medium because it is rare that anything is well done.

The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.

Vaudeville could not vouch for the honesty, the integrity, or the mentality of the individuals who collectively made up the horde the medium embraced. All the human race demands of its members is that they be born. That is all vaudeville demanded. You just had to be born. You could be ignorant and be a star. You could be a moron and be wealthy. The elements that went to make up vaudeville were combed from the jungles, the four corners of the world, the intelligentsia and the subnormal.

To a newspaperman, a human being is an item with skin wrapped around it.

Hollywood is a great place if you're an orange.

He writes so well he makes me feel like putting my quill back in my goose.

The world is a grindstone and life is your nose