Top 981 Quotes & Sayings by George Carlin - Page 15

When you're high, it's easy to kid yourself about how clever certain mediocre pieces of material are.

I just try to find targets I feel something about and express it my way.

When I got out of high school they retired my jersey, but it was for hygiene and sanitary reasons.

Catholic school gave me the tools to reject the very religion they wanted me to have. They taught me how to think for myself and to be independent.

The best thing about living at the water's edge: You only have assholes on three sides of you, and if they come this way you can hear them splash.

Two things happened. The creative side of my career was harmed. When I'd sit down and write under the influence of coke, the ratio of pages kept to pages thrown out declined drastically. But onstage, when rapping about a feeling I already owned, I would sometimes get a burst of eloquence.

I think there's a little more attention to human needs than to property rights. But I don't think much of political activism. It's so shortsighted. Most people are interested in their own personal comfort. I've said that about environmentalists. I think they care about bike paths and places to park their Volvos, not the planet as an abstraction.

As a matter of principle, I never attend the first annual anything.

Don Ho can sign autographs 3.4 times faster than Efrem Zimbalist Jr.

I was never a pipe or bong man. That's California stuff. I was an Eastern roller.

Whereas your blackness, ethnicity, homosexuality is something that might be genetic, I can't touch that, and I have no right.

People are dreaming if they think they have rights. They've never had rights. There's no such thing.

When it comes to bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims: religion... Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do.

You ever notice that? Any time you see two groups of people who really hate each other, chances are good they're wearing different kind of hats. Keep an eye on that, it might be important.

I became a guy who wanted to be a comedian someday, or a comic actor. The way I put it was, I'll be like Danny Kaye. He was kind of the model I had in mind.

Sun worship is fairly simple. There's no mystery, no miracles, no pageantry, no one asks for money, there are no songs to learn, and we don't have a special building where we all gather once a week to pare compare clothing.

I like to write without being stoned. I like to have a hit or two and then go punch up the writing. I just see different things and hear different things. But it's nice to be working from the base that I wrote originally and then come to it with a little buzz. I can have a little wine from time to time. I have a hit from time to time, but those are the only things I do.

I think self-expression is present at all times, and whether or not you're talking about the outside world or your responses to it depends on the moment and the subject.

On Thanksgiving, you realize you're living in a modern world. Millions of turkeys baste themselves in millions of ovens that clean themselves.

He is dead now, but he meant well.

The women who line up at a comic's dressing-room door are not what you'd call your class groupies.

If a piece requires some specific inflection, I'll record it. I take a lot of notes, and later categorize them, combining them alongside existing ideas, and eventually put a piece together.

If a drug has anything going for it at all, it should be self-limiting. It should tell you when you've had enough.

Who decides when the applause should die down? It seems like it's a group decision; everyone begins to say to themselves at the same time, "Well, okay, that's enough of that."

I always wanted and enjoyed sex, but I never put much importance on scoring or having an athletic sex life. I guess I define myself more by my career and my commitment to a relationship than by my ability to have a lot of chicks or achieve ten orgasms in an evening.

The only good thing about religion is the music. Because nature is filled with balances and opposites, there are always exceptions to the overall rules, whether the overall rules are bleak or otherwise. If you propound a joyous theory of existence, I will find an exception to that. If I propound a bleak theory, someone will find a joyous exception. That's just nature being nature, I think, and I don't think it offers a lot of hope. It's sort of a respite along the way.

If two baseball players from the same hometown, on different teams, receive the same uniform number, it is not ironic. It is a coincidence. If Barry Bonds attains lifetime statistics identical to his father's, it will not be ironic. It will be a coincidence.

Broadway isn't a very big career move. There's no money in it and it doesn't mean anything to your career. It's just a nice little jewel in the crown.

My father? My father left when I was quite young. Well actually, he was asked to leave. He had trouble metabolizing alcohol.

I'd say pot has been a break-even proposition for me.

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

There are women named Faith, Hope, Joy, and Prudence. Why not Despair, Guilt, Rage, and Grief? It seems only right. 'Tom, I'd like you to meet the girl of my dreams, Tragedy.' These days, Trajedi.

Hitler never bothered with restaurant reservations; he just dropped by. And somehow they always found him a table.

To me, smoking pot meant sitting with a newspaper on my legs, rolling the seeds down, pulling the twigs out and finally producing a perfectly cylindrical, absolutely wonderful joint that you either locked at both ends or pinched off, or pinched at one end and left open at the other.

The ritual was very important to me: cleaning the pot, rolling the pot.

In football the object is to march into enemy territory and cross his goal. In baseball the object is to go home.

I quit school in ninth grade, even though I was good at the studies. I knew I didn't need school for what I wanted.

Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game. Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.

Next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you're in a science fiction movie. And whisper, 'The creature is regenerating itself.'

The ending of my experience with cocaine came in a periodic way. I would get high less frequently, I would use smaller amounts, and I would do coke for less periods of time. And that process just kept increasing and increasing until I wasn't using it at all. I didn't go on a program anywhere. I didn't join an organization or detox anywhere. I just slowly tapered off until it was gone. That was also true of my heavy pot use. I just tapered off until there was almost no use at all. And the same thing was true of drinking tons of beer.

I don't have to tell you it goes without saying there are some things better left unsaid. I think that speaks for itself. The less said about it the better.

I don`t understand a belief that there is an invisible being in the sky who watches over us all the time and keeps score and who throws you in a burning pit. I think that's very limiting, very antihuman. It's the way they devised for helping to control people because if they can make you believe in an invisible man who's going to hurt you later, they can make you believe anything!

Barry Goldwater has definitely decided to be a candidate in '64. He will campaign in all thirteen states.

Test of Metal: Will of Iron, Nerves of Steel, Heart of Gold, Balls of Brass.

Why do croutons come in airtight packages? It's just stale bread to begin with.

And, of course, the funniest food: "kumquats". I don't even bring them home anymore. I sit there laughing and they go to waste.

Engineers at General Motors have developed a revolutionary new engine whose only function is to lubricate itself.

I'm happy to tell you there is very little in this world that I believe in.

Mother's milk leads to everything.

Somehow I enjoy watching people suffer.

George Washington’s brother, Lawrence, was the Uncle of Our Country.

I tell ya, if I hadn't chosen the career of being a performer, I think linguistics would have been a natural area that I'd have loved - to teach it, probably, Language has always fascinated me. There's a genetic inheritance there a good language gene, which I inherited [from my mother and grandfather] and she fostered that in me as he fostered that in her.

Don't take guilt trips. Take a trip to the mall, to the next county, to a foreign country, but NOT to where the guilt is.

Your home is your refuge.

The person who is most a part of me is the performer, is the standup, the guy who says, "Hey look at me, listen to this!" I do that because that's what I do, I love doing it.

Tonight's forecast: DARK. Continued mostly dark tonight, turning to wildly scattered light in the morning

I suspect there really was more to my accident than bad luck. I think it was God's way of punishing my nose.

Being a Dodgers fan led to my first Air Force court-martial, but that's another story.

First I was a mimic. Practically from the moment I began talking, I did impersonations of the people in my neighborhood - the storekeepers, the policemen, my teachers.

You've built up so much speed that you HIT 70! After that it's a day-by-day thing; you HIT Wednesday!