Top 981 Quotes & Sayings by George Carlin - Page 16

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American comedian George Carlin.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
The rebellious mood of the country during those [60th] years allowed me to plug right back into my old hatreds. I could scream and holler, as I did on the albums, against religion, government, big business - all those assholes and their values. That hatred was very real.
Somebody once said that Hollywood is based on a lot of producers deliberately making bad movies, and every now and then somebody gets lucky.
My father and mother separated when I was two months old. — © George Carlin
My father and mother separated when I was two months old.
The patterns became even more vivid at Cardinal Hayes High School. That's when I began failing subjects and running away from home for days at a time.
Meanwhile, followers of Eastern religions are sitting in the middle of their minds, experiencing a bliss and a level of consciousness that Western man can't begin to approach.
I profess no belief in God, which by definition is true, especially if we take the accepted definition of God. But to be an atheist is to also have a belief, and have a system, and I don't know that I like that either.
I loved the angiogram. They stick a thing in your thigh and it goes all the way up to your heart. Isn't that a thrill? Well, at least the nurse scored thigh.
Everything that you know about yourself comes from thinking back, and I think I saw religion as the first big betrayal of me.
You know who would make an interesting murder-suicide? Madeline Albright and Yanni.
Religion is sort of like a lift in your shoes. If it makes you feel better, fine. Just don't ask me to wear your shoes.
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.
I never took reds or Quaaludes to balance out the coke. So when it got to be four in the morning and the gram was three quarters gone, I'd start wishing it was nine o'clock and hoping the guy got up early. But, of course, he didn't sleep either, so there was no sweat. During all those years, I was always looking forward to the next snort or the next guy I could score from.
Do you remember Barbara Bush? I call her the silver douchebag.
I was trying to get out of the night clubs and was thinking maybe I'll go to the colleges now; that's where you can speak your mind. — © George Carlin
I was trying to get out of the night clubs and was thinking maybe I'll go to the colleges now; that's where you can speak your mind.
The older I got, the more apparent it became that my mother was losing control over me. She fought back fiercely with black moods, silent treatments and martyrdom. And, of course, all she did was run my ass out of the house even quicker. The pressure was unbearable.
I'm kinda like herpes, I just keep coming back.
Have you noticed when you wear a hat for a long time it feels like it's not there anymore? And then when you take it off it feels like it's still there?
Nothing you see on the Internet is mine unless it comes from one of my albums, books, HBO specials, or appeared on my website.
My mother didn't get home until about seven most nights and, yes, there was a sense of being very alone after school. She gave me all the proper guidance and influences, but physically, she just couldn't be there.
I never go anywhere or do anything that transports me outside the boundaries of my mind.
Writing books isn't a drastic departure from writing for the stage. I've always written in the long format, five, eight, 10-minute pieces rather than one-liners, so since writing books, the process hasn't changed much. A piece in my live routine can end up as part of one of my HBO specials, and it can also end up in one of the books.
Sometimes, after I'd gone at the coke like one of those snow plows moving up First Avenue, I'd think my heart was over on the dresser, pounding, and I was watching it. I asked some of the doctors who drifted through the intensive-care unit what kind of effect total cocaine abuse has on the heart and they said things like, "Well, there's not enough valid information...." That kind of answer.
I always knew I could hold people's attention and make them laugh every 30 or 40 seconds, and I got approval and attention for that, so the behavior was reinforced. Later, that became an important skill on the street corner.
And off we go, out onto the highway looking for a little fun. Perhaps a flatbed truck loaded with human cadavers will explode in front of a Star Trek reunion. One can only dream and hope.
I'm not collegial, I don't hang out. I'm soloist, I like my solitude, I don't really hang around with comedians.
I became a radio nut. I loved the afternoon serials, and I got into jazz through the radio. I had a subscription to Down Beat when I was 12. And I'd spend a lot of time in front of the minor, miming records.
Why are a 'wise man' and a 'wiseguy' opposites?
What I hated most was seeing those priests and brothers getting so much pleasure out of inflicting pain. I wondered what was wrong with them.
There's a thing about cocaine - when I was doing it secretly, it didn't make me very sociable. I forget how others were, but it made me very inner-directed. So being in a sketch and rehearsing and the "hail fellow well met" camaraderie and all that stuff, I couldn't fake that or force that. It was painful.
I set out to become a comedian, and I said in order to do that the first thing I'll do is become a disc jockey and know my pop music. I like it, my voice is good, and I can start out getting confidence without an audience in front of me.
If anyone e-mails you something "by George Carlin," there's a 99 percent chance I did not write it. I didn't write "Paradox Of Our Time." I didn't write "George Carlin On Aging." I didn't write a eulogy for my wife after she died. I didn't write the New Orleans thing. I didn't write "I Am A Bad American." None of them. You know what I've decided to do? I'm going to get a little cheap put-it-together-yourself website called NotMe.com.
We are all precancerous.
No one is ever more him/herself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are down. It's very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open.
I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loath and despise the groups they identify or belong to.
There's a thrill when you steal something in plain view of other people. When you drop a newspaper over a sign and walk away with it, or take something off a wall and the sound of the glue ripping makes people turn around. Your heart is racing, it's a rush.
Lenny Bruce genius was the unique ability to investigate hypocrisy and expose social inequities in a street rap that was really a form of poetry.
Sudden total weight loss.
You're really spread out now, you've got stuff all over the WORLD! You've got stuff at home, stuff in storage, stuff in Honolulu, stuff in Maui, stuff in your pockets...supply lines are getting longer and harder to maintain.
As far as I'm concerned, humans have not yet come up with a belief that's worth believing. — © George Carlin
As far as I'm concerned, humans have not yet come up with a belief that's worth believing.
O. J. Simpson has already received the ultimate punishment: For the rest of his life he has to associate with golfers.
My mother and her plans for my future. She had it all worked out. I would attend a nice college, then get a job in advertising. "You'll be one of those smart-looking fellows in their Madison Avenue suits." And I rebelled against [my mother] and her values and her plans for my future at every opportunity.
Suddenly, I was thirty, very unhappy entertaining people in their forties, and here came a group of people in their teens and twenties who had similar anti-authority problems and similar dreams and wishes, hopes for mankind. So I gravitated toward them.
The fact that I didn't finish school left me with a lifelong need to prove that I'm smart, prove it to myself, maybe to the world. I [also] needed to be - not the center of attention - but I needed to be able to attract attention when I wanted it, through my stunts and my fooling around physically with faces or postures or voices I would do. Those things are important elements in the drive behind all of this [my career].
May you all make it to a healthy 100 and a half!!
I hope I'm beginning a new cycle of energy and creativity. If so, it'll really be my third career. The first was as a straight comic in the Sixties. The second was as a counterculture performer in the Seventies. The third will be...well, that's for others to judge.
When I was in seventh grade, I was caught stealing money from the visiting team's locker room during a basketball game. So I was sent to The Brothers. That's what they called this parochial school up in Goshen, New York. I was supposed to get closer supervision there and more "masculine influence," whatever that means. But I was thrown out for telling a couple of really lame kids on the playground that I had heroin.
I'm offering a special prize for the first Buick on the moon.
I am not a difficult man by any stretch, and I'm saying that with a full and honest inventory going on. I'm not. And I'm not angry on stage. There is a heightening. There is an intensification of the feelings on stage in order to let them carry the room. There is a theatricality about it. The whole thing is oratory, so there's persuasion involved. There's the art of rhetoric involved. And so, with hyperbole and with the desire to really punch the thing home, some of it reads a little more angry.
To me the cynics are the ones in the boardrooms with the reports from the focus groups. — © George Carlin
To me the cynics are the ones in the boardrooms with the reports from the focus groups.
The writing is what gives me the joy, especially editing myself for the page, and getting something ready to show to the editors, and then to have a first draft and get it back and work to fix it, I love reworking, I love editing, love love love revision, revision, revision, revision.
I'm certainly a skeptic. I always quibble with people.
I grew up in New York wanting to be like those funny men in the movies and on the radio.
It's difficult enough for a young person to put his soul on the line in front of a lot of drunken people without having that hanging over his head, too.
In my neighborhood - West 121st Street in New York, "white Harlem" - there were only two drugs: smack and marijuana. By the time I was 13, some friends and I were using marijuana fairly regularly. The Reefer Madness myth was still very strong then, but I'd been into jazz and those lyrics included so many casual references to pot that it was completely demystified for me.
I was kind of sweet kid, according my mother, and my recollections. Thoughtful and good, but kind of alone - although I didn't interpret it that way, as such. Children never interpret these things. They think they understand logically.
I was a stonehead for 30 years. I'd wake up in the morning and if I couldn't decide whether I wanted a joint or not, I'd smoke a joint to figure it out. And I stayed high all day long.
When I listen to those tapes now, the real cocaine shows; there's just nothing special about their content.
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?
How come when it's us, it's an abortion, and when it's a chicken, it's an omelette? Are we so much better than chickens all of a sudden? When did this happen; that we passed chickens in goodness? Name six ways we're better than chickens. See, nobody can do it! You know why? 'Cause chickens are decent people.
For an entertainer, part of the thing you do is just style. And the coke did help me get into great runs of pure form.
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