183 Quotes by Tom Lehrer

I don’t have the temperament of a performer, and I certainly couldn’t do it every night.

I don’t want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.

Soon we’ll be out amid the cold world’s strife. Soon we’ll be sliding down the razor blade of life. But as we go our sordid sep’rate ways, We shall ne’er forget thee, thou golden college days. Hearts full of youth, Hearts full of truth, Six parts gin to one part vermouth.

Once all the Germans were warlike and mean But that couldn’t happen again We taught them a lesson in nineteen eighteen And they’ve hardly bothered us since then.

I recall this sergeant’s informing me and my “room-mates” of this rather deplorable fact the army didn’t have any official, excuse me, didn’t have no official song and suggested that we work on this in our copious free time.

Don’t solicit for your sister, it’s not nice. Unless you get a good percentage of her price.

If I see a movie star in the department store buying something, I’ll kind of sidle up and see what they’re saying, what they look like, how they sound. That’s an invasion of privacy.

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

Once you’ve heard the joke, it’s not funny anymore, but it’s the way it’s told. And I think that’s the same with the music: The reason some of my songs have lasted longer is there’s a lot of stuff packed in there. You want to hear them more than once.