Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Orson Bean

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American actor Orson Bean.

Last updated on November 14, 2024.

Orson Bean was an American film, television, and stage actor, comedian, writer, and producer. He was a game show and talk show host and a "mainstay of Los Angeles’s small theater scene." He appeared frequently on several televised game shows from the 1960s through the 1980s and was a longtime panelist on the television game show To Tell the Truth. "A storyteller par excellence", he was a favorite of Johnny Carson, appearing on The Tonight Show more than 200 times.

American - Actor | July 22, 1928 - February 7, 2020

Source: Wikipedia

I remember the glory days of film making. I used to go to the movies a lot.

Orson Bean

My wife and I sold our house New York and moved to Australia for a year; then we came back and spent almost three years bumming around the country in an old '61 VW van. We put the kids in school wherever we happened to be, but mainly we reveled in being rootless.

Orson Bean

My grandfather lived in New England all his life and was a Vermonter.

Orson Bean

I felt only a conservative president could bring peace in Vietnam 'cause he wouldn't be accused of being soft on communism.

Orson Bean

Until I read Neill's book, 'Summerhill,' I thought there were only two ways to bring up children, either with authoritarian discipline or with permissiveness. Either way, hopefully, applied with love. Now I know there is a third way: teaching a child self*regulation, not by coercion or by abandoning discipline, but by freedom with responsibility.

Orson Bean

Miracles aren't necessarily good for everyone. The parting of the Red Sea, great for the Jews, not so hot for the Egyptian soldiers.

Orson Bean

One of the things I'm proudest of, one year on my refrigerator, I taped a Christmas card from the Republican National Committee and season's greetings from Gus Hall of the American Communist Party. They both stayed up their months and I'm proud of it.

Orson Bean

I don't know anyone who doesn't have an empty spot at the center of him, which must be filled in order to be really happy. That spot, like it or not, is reserved for God.

Orson Bean

In '08, Barrack Obama was famously elected president. Even though I'd supported McCain and dreaded what I feared Barrack might do, I felt a surge of elation when the networks announced he'd won. I really hadn't thought the U.S. would go for an African-American for a decade or so.

Orson Bean

I'd lived through World War II and hadn't been able to wait to join the army as soon as I turned 18.

Orson Bean

What I learned at home was despair and hopelessness. What I learned at the pictures was don't give up the ship, we have only begun to fight, it's always darkest before the dawn.

Orson Bean

Being a good game show panelist is like being a virtuoso of the kazoo.

Orson Bean

In New Jersey, judges have ruled that a same-sex couple or a single person applying to adopt must be given the same place in line as a married man and woman. I think that's bad for kids. This makes me homophobic? I'm in show business. Half the people in my life are gay.

Orson Bean

The nineteen fifties was a time of tumultuous change.

Orson Bean

Back in the fifties (the nineteen fifties, not the eighteen fifties) I did some writing for Mad Magazine, along with my friend Ernie Kovaks and a pair of comics named Bob and Ray.

Orson Bean

I am dedicated to giving my kids the memory of happy parents. So I spend a lot of time with them. We really know each other. If they should decide later on that they hate me, at least they'll know who they're hating.

Orson Bean

Strange are the ways of human behavior.

Orson Bean

I think God loves to hear little kids laugh at fart jokes. He didn't just make sunsets and bluebirds, He made hot babes. And dirty old men like me. That's the modest message I've set out to tell the world: you don't have to be Ned Flanders to be a Christian.

Orson Bean

If there should be one place where you should forget politics, forget whether you're liberal or conservative, whether you hate Trump or love him, it should be the ballgame.

Orson Bean

I was living in a four-story Manhattan townhouse with three full-time servants and silver to be polished, and I was doing too much. My kids were growing up without me, and suddenly I thought, 'I want some other stuff.' So I stopped working instead of cutting back, and went to Australia instead of Vermont.

Orson Bean

For most of my life I didn't believe in God. Who had time?

Orson Bean

When I grew up, which was really in the 30s and the 40s, the movies were a moral guideline for me.

Orson Bean

TV has changed everything.

Orson Bean

I'm thankful I've learned to embrace insecurity, not just to tolerate it. Life is more fun that way, and I'm thankful for that, too.

Orson Bean

I grew up on Harvard Square and I watched 50-year old men walking around with green book bags slung over their shoulders going for their fourth PhD, never having left the world of academia to alleged reality.

Orson Bean

Possessions can possess you. Even a lawn can possess you. It makes you buy a garden hose. Which makes you water. Which cuts into time you might be happier spending some other way.

Orson Bean

I didn't want to be famous for its own sake. I wanted to be famous so as to be happy.

Orson Bean

I think of my life as a cheap novel. Part of you wants it to go on forever, and part of you wants to see how it comes out.

Orson Bean

I've made a lot of dumb mistakes, but I don't regret them at all.

Orson Bean

I think it was a miracle that Trump got elected.

Orson Bean

I don't spend my life making money to spend tomorrow, or to acquire possessions.

Orson Bean

I didn't use a voice change to do Bilbo. I have a distinctive voice anyway. I did an attitude change, making Bilbo kind of fussy - fussy and proper - then gradually dropped the fussiness and properness as the madness of battle really affects him.

Orson Bean

The reason I became a Christian is the same reason I became a conservative: I paid attention.

Orson Bean

The only real benefit of being famous is being recognized by head waiters and getting good tables at restaurants. The rest is part ego trip and part inconvenience.

Orson Bean

People shouldn't get into show business because they want to become stars or become rich; they should get into it because they can't help but put on a show.

Orson Bean

Most municipalities grow up around commerce; there's a harbor, or the train stops there. Venice, CA was founded for fun.

Orson Bean

Cecil B. DeMille worshipped the almighty buck.

Orson Bean

What is it with me? I seem to be an incorrigible black-listee.

Orson Bean

I'm not a pessimist. I do believe that in some way we don't understand, God has a hand in things and it will all work out for America. Our money says In God We Trust. And we are the best country, aren't we?

Orson Bean

Back in the fifties I was the hot, young comic on CBS and a regular on 'The Ed Sullivan Show.' I was also starring in shows on Broadway and acting in dramatic programs on television. Those were the glory days of television. It was like theater. It was live. If an actor forgot a line, he improvised. There was an immediacy to it.

Orson Bean

When I was a kid, FDR on the radio said, 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself.' We should be afraid of fear, or at least of acting out of it.

Orson Bean

I think America was a miracle. I think God loves this country.

Orson Bean

San Francisco is a city; L.A. is a collection of suburbs that have very little in common with one another.

Orson Bean

The movies saved my life. I grew up in the great depression, the only child of a pair of star crossed lovers. My father lost his job. My mother drank. They fought. The movies were my escape.

Orson Bean

I think people are afraid to be original.

Orson Bean

Men are attracted to youth and beauty; women are attracted to power.

Orson Bean

I made up my mind I was going to walk that thin line between fame and oblivion.

Orson Bean

God is being siphoned out of the public arena. People don't even say God bless you when you sneeze anymore. I want to be able to lay a Merry Christmas on someone without its feeling like a political statement.

Orson Bean

I did my teen-age years in World War II. War news was a constant. We kept the radio on in our house to hear Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from the rooftops of London, describing the blitz.

Orson Bean

In the long period of time when I did talk shows and game shows, a whole new generation of people came along who thought of me as that, and not as a theater person.

Orson Bean

War was a way of life for Americans in the early forties. Heroism was expected.

Orson Bean

I had come to New York seeking my fortune after a few years of honing my craft as a stand-up on the road.

Orson Bean

One night in a club in Boston, I tried the name Roger Duck. No laughs. The next night, I tried Orson Bean, putting together a pompous first name and a silly second name. I got laughs, so I decided to keep it.

Orson Bean

It's wrong to make a living off the theater. Theater should be supported, like redwood trees. You should make your living - whether you're a writer or an actor or a director - in movies or commercials. But you do theater out of love.

Orson Bean

Each morning and night I get down on my knees and thank God for my life and ask Him to make me grateful all the time instead of just most of the time.

Orson Bean

Being happy is a revolutionary act; I think it spreads, like ripples in a pond.

Orson Bean

I'm greedy for experience. I keep finding new things.

Orson Bean

I adored my mother. She was beautiful, smart, sexy and funny.

Orson Bean

Whatever else it was about, the feminist movement had no interest in exploding the myth of the mysterious and wonderful world of business; it simply wanted in on it.

Orson Bean

Left-wingers and right-wingers come together when they become extreme enough. The Nazi Party was called National Socialism, very similar to Stalin's Communism, with the addition of 'the Fatherland.'

Orson Bean

Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Orson Bean

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