Top 981 Quotes & Sayings by George Carlin - Page 12

All the wrong things for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes people just want to feel different. And so long as Third World peasants are poor they will send us drugs, and as long as we are empty we will ask for this little plant.

Would a fly without wings be called a walk?

I don't think we really gave barbarism a fair try.

You get to play with people's little danger zones.

Sex criminals. Completely incurable... I suppose you could outlaw religion and these sex crimes would disappear in a generation or two, but we don't have time for rational solutions.

You can't be the fastest gun in town forever. There comes a time when you're not the golden boy, and you have to go off somewhere and figure yourself out.

What occurs as you age is an accumulation of information, data, knowledge, and what I'm going to call the matrix of the mind. There's just a rich, textured, field of information and impressions that have been all networked by the brain.

Cancer research is a growth industry.

There are some people that aren't into all the words. There are some people who would have you not use certain words. Yeah, there are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven of them that you can't say on television. What a ratio that is. 399,993 to seven. They must really be bad. They'd have to be outrageous, to be separated from a group that large. All of you over here, you seven. Bad words. That's what they told us they were, remember? 'That's a bad word.' You know bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad intentions.

There's a part of me that is angry. Not in the sense of, "Gee, George is an angry guy!" I mean, anyone who's been with me five minutes, five years, whatever, they would tell you they've rarely seen me in a moment of anger. Yes, I can become highly irritated in a line that's moving slowly, or with a clerk who's incompetent. But I don't yell. I don't get rude. I am clear about what I expect. In a store, my mother always told me, "Ask for the manager immediately. It changes the tone of the conversation."

I call him Governor Bush because that's the only political office he's ever held legally in this country. I don't care where they hang his portrait, I don't care how big his library is. To me, he'll always be "Governor Bush." I don't even capitalize his name when I type it anymore.

One of the effects it [cocaine] had on my personality - my moods, my behaviors - was that it inhibited me a lot. It kind of took possibilities out of my world, and made the focus of things very narrow.

A cat will blink when struck with a hammer.

I'll tell you a little secret about the Blues: it's not enough to know which notes to play, you have to know why they need to be played.

Marry an orphan: you'll never have to spend boring holidays with the in-laws.

A pear is a failed apple.

Art, music, and philosophy are merely poignant examples of what we might have been had not the priests and traders gotten hold of us.

Instead of thinking about the sex, I'd always think about the clap and the crabs those people have.

I think tobacco and alcohol warnings are too general. They should be more to the point: 'People who smoke will eventually cough up small pieces of lung.'... And 'Warning!! Alcohol will turn you into the same jerk your father was.'

The phrase surgical strike might be more acceptable if it were common practice to perform surgery with high explosives.

Just think, right now as you read this, some guy somewhere is gettin' ready to hang himself.

My history of moving away from drugs is not the kind you hear from most people. Certainly not from celebrities, especially those professionally recovering people. What I've noticed in my overuse of cocaine is the period of pleasure versus the period of pain. That is to say that when you first get high on anything, the pleasure is predominant and you don't pay much price. A little hangover or whatever it might be with another drug. But after a while the ratio begins to change, and there' s far more pain in the deal than pleasure. It just completely goes in another direction.

Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.

Although the photographer and the art thief were close friends, neither had ever taken the other's picture.

Sometimes a fireman will go to great strenuous lengths to save a raccoon that's stuck in a drainpipe and then go out on the weekend and kill several of them for amusement.

Singing is basically a form of pleasant, controlled screaming.

When he got loaded, the human cannonball knew there were not many men of his caliber.

When I ask how old your toddler is, I don't need to hear '27 months.' 'He's two' will do just fine. He's not a cheese. And I didn't really care in the first place.

I find that an entertainer is quite content to sit still, and I think an artist always has a little motion, always going somewhere. May not know where it is, but there is some sort of unnamed destination. There is some pulling, some movement. So I just found myself in that category according to my own analysis.

One philosopher has rightly said that property is theft. But I'd like to use my future ownership of property to give something back.

I'm not in show business because I don't have to go to the meetings, I'm just not a part of it, I don't belong to it. When you "belong" to something. You want to think about that word, "belong." People should think about that: it means they own you. If you belong to something it owns you, and I just don't care for that. I like spinning out here like one of those subatomic particles that they can't quite pin down.

Results like these [state of the earth] do not belong on the resumé of a supreme being.

I never eat sushi. I have trouble eating things that are merely unconscious.

For a long time, I've distinguished between entertainer and performer and entertainer and artist. To me, an entertainer is someone who pleases others, and an artist tries to please himself.

It ended suddenly for Brenda, more slowly for me. My runs began getting shorter and less pleasurable. I'd feel bad after only one day, or only a few hours, instead of four or five days. And I began to want to stop. One of the proudest moments of my life was at a rock-'n'-roll theater in New Jersey. A guy actually put some coke under my nose and I was able to say, "No, thanks," and turn my head away.

It's harder to be funny from the position of power.

Know my feelings about traffic laws? Cop didn't see it? I didn't do it.

Why do we park on driveways and drive on parkways? Just to be silly!

You get into your teens, now they can't hold you back. You jump to the next number, or even a few ahead.

Some people think that words can injure the psyche or the moral fiber. And they really can't.

I saw Danny Kaye in a movie, and he was doing voices and faces on that big, big screen and making whole audiences laugh. It was just an instant hookup.

No one ever says, 'It's only a game' when their team is winning.

Everyone should try to scratch their name on the bomb of life.

My grandfather, mother and father were gifted verbally, and my mother passed that along to me. She always made sure I was conscious of language and words.

I don't understand the problem with paroling Charles Manson? I say set him free and let him get on with his work. I have a long list of celebrities I'd be glad to share with him.

I don't care much about the outcome. I'd like for people to feel better and have better lives, but I don't think that's in the cards through political action. I think bloodshed is still the way you get dramatic change. That'll never happen because they've got all the guns now. At least they've got the nice guns, the big ones, the ones with night vision.

How can He be perfect? Everything He ever makes...dies.

Tell the people you love that you love them, at every opportunity.

I look at it this way... For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers... so when nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse.

I'm 63 now. But that's just 17 Celsius.

You never see a smiling runner.

Christian Deodorant: "Thou Shalt Not Smell"

Never let the brain idle. ‘An idle mind is the devil’s workshop.’ And the devil’s name is Alzheimer’s.

I hope we're not just human garbage drifting toward a big sewer. But I think so.

When you think about it, attention-deficit order makes a lot of sense. In this country there isn't a lot worth paying attention to.

Rhetoric paints with a broad brush.

It's nothing but a big stroke job in this country. The government strokes you every day of your life. Religion never stops stroking you. Big business gives you a good stroke. And it's one big, transcontinental, cross-country, red, white and blue stroke job... Do you know what the national emblem for this country ought to be? Forget that bald eagle. The national emblem of this country ought to be Uncle Sam standing naked at attention saluting, and seated on a chair next to him, the Statue of Liberty jerking him off. That would be a good symbol for the United Strokes of America.

Never give up on an idea simply because it is bad and doesn't work.

I do something about the weather. I stay home.

I have things that are strident and confrontational, and I have a lot of things that are childlike and innocent and sort of sweet. So, somewhere in between lies the middle of me.