Tom Lehrer

Tom Lehrer , Mathematician and Musician

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• Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.
  • foreword to "We'll All Go Together When We Go", An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer, 1959

• Any ideas expressed on this record should not be taken as representing Mr. Lehrer's true convictions, for indeed he has none. "If anyone objects to any statement I make," he has said, "I am quite prepared not only to retract it, but also to deny under oath that I ever made it."
  • liner note, That Was the Year That Was, 1965

• I do have a cause though. It's obscenity. I'm for it.
  • foreword to "Smut", That Was the Year That Was, 1965

• But don't panic. Base eight is just like base ten really - if you're missing two fingers.
  • "New Math", That Was the Year That Was, 1965

• It's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.
  • foreword to "Alma", That Was the Year That Was, 1965

• Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days, in books and plays and movies, is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love: husbands and wives who can't communicate, children who can't communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books and plays and so on, and in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up.
  • afterword to "Alma", That Was the Year That Was, 1965

• I've said that political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel [Peace] Prize.
  • interview, The Onion A.V. Club Volume 36 Issue 19, May 24, 2000
  • Note: The original saying is widely quoted and misquoted, but the source and correct wording are lost in the mists of time; this restatement is at least documented.

• No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has The Truth. To be an atheist is almost as arrogant as to be a fundamentalist. But then again, I can get pretty arrogant.
  • anwser given to 'So do you consider yourself an atheist or an agnostic?' interview question