Fred Allen Quotes

Treat employees like partners, and they act like partners.

He dreamed he was eating shredded wheat and woke up to find the mattress half gone.

You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.

Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in a gnat's navel with room left over for two caraway seeds and an agent's heart.

Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is to make a hole in one with you.

He's so small, he's a waste of skin.

My uncle is a Southern planter. He's an undertaker in Alabama.

The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.

After quitting radio I was able to live on the money I saved on aspirins.

I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.

Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.

Three million frogs' legs are served in Paris - daily. Nobody knows what became of the rest of the frogs.

On ships they call them barnacles; in business they attach themselves to desks and are called vice presidents.

The S.S. Sierra was a ten-thousand-ton vessel. Today, lifeboats bigger than the Sierra are found on the Queen Mary and other luxury liners.

Condensed milk is wonderful. I don't see how they can get a cow to sit down on those little cans.

Hush, little bright line, don’t you cry You’ll be a cliché by and by.

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.

Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.

A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.

The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.

It was once rumored that fledgling executives walked around their offices backwards so they wouldn't have to face an issue.

It is bad to suppress laughter. It goes back down and spreads to your hips.

My hometown was so dull that one time the tide went out and never came back.

Ed Sullivan will be around as long as someone else has talent.

Everything is for the eye these days - TV, Life, Look, the movies. Nothing is just for the mind. The next generation will have eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all.

Most of us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats; then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

Her hat is a creation that will never go out of style; it will just look ridiculous year after year.

A gentleman is any man who wouldn't hit a woman with his hat on.

The world is a grindstone and life is your nose

I'm a little hoarse tonight. I've been living in Chicago for the past two months, and you know how it is, yelling for help on the way home every night. Things are so tough in Chicago that at Easter time, for bunnies the little kids use porcupines.

If the grass is greener in the other fellow's yard- let him worry about cutting it.

A celebrity is a person who works hard all of their life to become well known, and then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.

A psychiatrists is the next man you start talking to after you start talking to yourself.

What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement.

An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.

Television is a triumph of equipment over people.

California is a fine place to live - if you happen to be an orange.

I don't want to own anything that won't fit into my coffin.

He writes so well he makes me feel like putting my quill back in my goose.

Success is like dealing with your kid or teaching your wife to drive. Sooner or later you'll end up in the police station.

I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.

He always had a chip on his shoulder that he was ready to use to kindle an argument.

Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.

An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer.

Television is the triumph of machine over people.

He has no idea what it was like to grow up in the South, where you had to hold your head down.

I was just working in the shop and all of a sudden something just triggered in me, and I started shaking. And then I walked back into the house and my wife asked, 'What's the matter?' And I said, 'I don't feel good.' And tears, uncontrollable tears, was coming out of my eyes and she says, 'What's the matter?' And I told her. I said, 'I just thought about that execution that I did two days ago, and everybody else's that I was involved in.' And what it was, something triggered within, and it just, everybody - all of these executions all sprung forward.