Top 132 Quotes & Sayings by Tom Lehrer

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American musician Tom Lehrer.

Last updated on December 24, 2024.

Thomas Andrew Lehrer is a retired American musician, singer-songwriter, satirist, and mathematician, having lectured on mathematics and musical theater. He is best known for the pithy and humorous songs that he recorded in the 1950s and 1960s. His songs often parodied popular musical forms, though he usually created original melodies when doing so. A notable exception is "The Elements", in which he set the names of the chemical elements to the tune of the "Major-General's Song" from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance.

American - Musician | Born: April 9, 1928

Source: Wikipedia

It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.

Tom Lehrer

There's something mathematically satisfying about music: notes fit together and harmony and all that. And mathematics has to do with abstractions and making connections.

Tom Lehrer

If a person feels he can't communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.

Tom Lehrer

I like Jon Stewart. He's not as obnoxious as Dennis Miller, whom I really can't stand.

Tom Lehrer

I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record.

Tom Lehrer

Counting in octal is just like counting in decimal, if you don't use your thumbs.

Tom Lehrer

Eddie Izzard is wonderful, I think, but I've only seen that one HBO special he did. He's one of the few people who talk about stuff other than girlfriends and relationships and flatulence and genitalia. There are very few of them who actually talk about real stuff.

Tom Lehrer

I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel.

Tom Lehrer

An actress must never lose her ego - without it she has no talent.

Tom Lehrer

Be prepared, and be careful not to do your good deeds when there's no one watching you.

Tom Lehrer

One of the things I'm proudest of is, on my record 'That Was the Year that Was' in 1965, I made a joke about spending $20 billion sending some clown to the moon. I was against the manned space program then, and I'm even more against it now, that whole waste of money.

Tom Lehrer

Apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

Tom Lehrer

The real issues I don't think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn't ban landmines.

Tom Lehrer

You can't be satirical and not be offensive to somebody.

Tom Lehrer

Bad weather always looks worse through a window.

Tom Lehrer

I thought about majoring in Math, Chemistry and English, but Math had the fewest requirements, so I went with it. I knew I wanted to teach, and Math was my field, so I studied Math.

Tom Lehrer

I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.

Tom Lehrer

On my income tax 1040 it says 'Check this box if you are blind.' I wanted to put a check mark about three inches away.

Tom Lehrer

My last public performance for money was in 1967. For free, it was 1972, with the exception of two little one-shot, one-song things. But that's just for friends, out of friendship for the people involved, and also because it was fun.

Tom Lehrer

I wasn't really a performer by temperament.

Tom Lehrer

It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year.

Tom Lehrer

I loved high school, but I wouldn't want to do it again.

Tom Lehrer

In my youth there were words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can't say 'girl.'

Tom Lehrer

I always prided myself on at least trying to be literate and use the right words, and if the audience didn't get it, then they could go home and look it up.

Tom Lehrer

I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!

Tom Lehrer

I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up.

Tom Lehrer

If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend or, perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.

Tom Lehrer

When I was in college, there were certain words you couldn't say in front of a girl. Now you can say them, but you can't say 'girl.'

Tom Lehrer

I feel that if a person has problems communicating the very least he can do is to shut up.

Tom Lehrer

Irreverence is easy - what's hard is wit.

Tom Lehrer

The people who were in college in the '50s were my first real audience, and their kids, the people who found my records in the cabinet during their 'Mad 'magazine years picked me up also.

Tom Lehrer

I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity.

Tom Lehrer

San Francisco is a city of twenty-something millionaire white kids named Doug.

Tom Lehrer

Laughter is involuntary. If it's funny you laugh.

Tom Lehrer

Political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize.

Tom Lehrer

I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit. Every now and then I wrote something, and every now and then I didn't. The second just outnumbered the first.

Tom Lehrer

The Army has carried the American ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability.

Tom Lehrer

I have always found it interesting... that there are people who regard copyright infringement as a form of flattery.

Tom Lehrer

Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

Tom Lehrer

Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.

Tom Lehrer

I stopped performing because I don't have the temperament of a performer. You have to want to do the same thing over and over again. Once I got it right, I didn't want to do it again. I always use the analogy of a novelist who has to read his novel in public night after night. I just didn't want to do it.

Tom Lehrer

When you get to fifty-two food becomes more important than sex.

Tom Lehrer

When you're in a public profession like I was, and you stop doing it like I did, people think you're either crazy or dead.

Tom Lehrer

I was immersed in popular songs of the time, of the '30s and '40s. I was writing songs, making fun of the attitudes of those songs, in the musical style of the songs themselves; love songs, folk songs, marches, football.

Tom Lehrer

I'm not interested in promoting myself or revealing to total strangers anything about me. That's not my job.

Tom Lehrer

Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.

Tom Lehrer

Don't write naughty words on the wall if you can't spell!

Tom Lehrer

As for language, almost everything goes now. That is not to say that verbal taboos have disappeared, but merely that they have shifted somewhat. In my youth, for example, there were certain words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can say them, but you can't say 'girl'.

Tom Lehrer

Irreverence is easy - whats hard is wit.

Tom Lehrer

"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it." It's always seemed to me that this is precisely the sort of dynamic, positive thinking that we so desperately need today in these trying times of crisis and universal brouhaha.

Tom Lehrer

Filth, I'm glad to say, is in the mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, everything is lewd.

Tom Lehrer

When correctly viewed, everything is lewd.

Tom Lehrer

Alas, irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness, at least in the so-called mass media. What we have now - to quote myself at my most pretentious - is a nimiety of scurrility with a concomitant exiguity of taste.

Tom Lehrer

Plagiarize! Plagiarize, Let no one else's work evade your eyes, Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, So don't shade your eyes, But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize... Only be sure always to call it please "research".

Tom Lehrer

If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.

Tom Lehrer

Disclaimer: If anyone disagrees with anything I say, I am quite prepared to not only retract it, but also to deny under oath I ever said it.

Tom Lehrer

I find enough mystery in mathematics to satisfy my spiritual needs. I think, for example, that pi is mysterious enough (don't get me started!) without having to worry about God. Or if pi isn't enough, how about fractals? or quantum mechanics?

Tom Lehrer

Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down ? That's not my department.

Tom Lehrer

Always predict the worst, and you'll be hailed as a prophet.

Tom Lehrer

The reason most folksongs are so atrocious is that they were written by the people.

Tom Lehrer