George Carlin Quotes

If a piece requires some specific inflection, I'll record it. I take a lot of notes, and later categorize them, combining them alongside existing ideas, and eventually put a piece together.

I'm not an angry person, just very disappointed and contemptuous of my fellow humans' choices - and on stage those feelings sometimes are exaggerated for a theatric stage - you're on a stage you have an audience of 2500 or 3000 people: you need to project the feelings, the emotions it's heightened, and people mistake it for a personal anger but it's more dissatisfaction, disappointment and contempt for these things we've settled for.

There's a reason education sucks, and it's the same reason it will never ever ever be fixed. It's never going to get any better. Don't look for it. Be happy with what you've got, because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now... the real owners. The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners.

I don't think drugs are a problem; I think they're a symptom. As long as Americans are empty, spiritually, emotionally, morally empty, they will need things like the drugs they choose to use. Mankind has wanted to change the way it felt from the beginning anyway. In this country there are even more reasons to want to feel different, to want to feel better, because this is such a neon sewer. This is such a degrading culture. It forces you to play Beethoven to your child in the uterus so that he will get into a better school and a better job and make more money so he can take care of you.

Meow” means “woof” in cat.

If the black box flight recorder is never damaged during a plane crash, why isn’t the whole airplane made out of that stuff?

The highly motivated people in society are the ones causing all the trouble. It's not the lazy unmotivated folks sitting in front of a TV eating potato chips who bother anyone.

They'll get it all from you sooner or later 'cause they own this f**kin' place. It's a big club and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. By the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hard-working people: white collar, blue collar, it doesn't matter what color shirt you have on.

People say life begins at conception, I say life began about a billion years ago and it's a continuous process.

I am a personal optimist but a skeptic about all else. What may sound to some like anger is really nothing more than sympathetic contempt. I view my species with a combination of wonder and pity, and I root for its destruction. And please don't confuse my point of view with cynicism; the real cynics are the ones who tell you everything's gonna be all right.

I credit that eight years of grammar school with nourishing me in a direction where I could trust myself and trust my instincts. They gave me the tools to reject my faith. They taught me to question and think for myself and to believe in my instincts to such an extent that I just said, "This is a wonderful fairy tale they have going here, but it's not for me."

In Rome, the emperor sat in a special part of the Colosseum called the Caesarian Section.

The ritual was very important to me: cleaning the pot, rolling the pot.

Running isn't a sport because anyone can do it. Anything we can all do can't be a sport. I can run, you can run. My mother can run, you don't see her on the cover of Sports Illustrated do you?

Baseball is the only major sport that appears backwards in a mirror.

I think I am, therefore, I am... I think.

If a movie is described as a romantic comedy, you can usually find me next door playing pinball.

One philosopher has rightly said that property is theft. But I'd like to use my future ownership of property to give something back.

People think life is real complicated. Actually, there's nothing to it. Once you leave out all the bullshit they teach you in school, life gets really simple.

No one ever says, 'It's only a game' when their team is winning.

Censorship that comes from the outside assumes about people an inability to make reasoned choices.

In my neighborhood - West 121st Street in New York, "white Harlem" - there were only two drugs: smack and marijuana. By the time I was 13, some friends and I were using marijuana fairly regularly. The Reefer Madness myth was still very strong then, but I'd been into jazz and those lyrics included so many casual references to pot that it was completely demystified for me.

If Helen Keller had psychic ability, would you say she had a fourth sense? What year did Jesus think it was?

Humor is based on surprise, and surprise is a milder way of saying shock. It's surprise that makes the joke.

When I was in seventh grade, I was caught stealing money from the visiting team's locker room during a basketball game. So I was sent to The Brothers. That's what they called this parochial school up in Goshen, New York. I was supposed to get closer supervision there and more "masculine influence," whatever that means. But I was thrown out for telling a couple of really lame kids on the playground that I had heroin.

Let me get a sip of water here... you figure this stuff is safe to drink? Actually, I don't care, I drink it anyway. You know why? Because I'm an American and I expect a little cancer in my food and water. I'm a loyal American and I'm not happy unless I let government and industry poison me a little bit every day.

I look at it this way... For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers... so when nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse.

Sometimes a fireman will go to great strenuous lengths to save a raccoon that's stuck in a drainpipe and then go out on the weekend and kill several of them for amusement.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

I gravitated toward being a funny guy. I liked the radio comedians. I lived in the Golden Age of radio, and the Golden Age of television came along when I was still in my early teens.

The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity.

I became a guy who wanted to be a comedian someday, or a comic actor. The way I put it was, I'll be like Danny Kaye. He was kind of the model I had in mind.

When Thomas Edison worked late into the night on the electric light, he had to do it by gas lamp or candle. I'm sure it made the work seem that much more urgent.

We use up words like 'spiritual' so fast in this culture. Twenty years ago spiritual had a distinct meaning. But now there's a lot of jack-off thinkers who just love to talk about the spiritual. And there is a lot of bogus - is bogosity a word? It should be - a lot of bogosity in these spiritual seekers. So you have to find another way to express it. I just call it 'how I fit'.

I quit school in ninth grade, even though I was good at the studies. I knew I didn't need school for what I wanted.

It's way beyond ironic that a place called the Holy Land is the location of the fiercest, most deeply felt hatred in the world. And it makes for wonderful theater.

If the shoe fits, buy another one just like it.

I find that an entertainer is quite content to sit still, and I think an artist always has a little motion, always going somewhere. May not know where it is, but there is some sort of unnamed destination. There is some pulling, some movement. So I just found myself in that category according to my own analysis.

Sometimes, after I'd gone at the coke like one of those snow plows moving up First Avenue, I'd think my heart was over on the dresser, pounding, and I was watching it. I asked some of the doctors who drifted through the intensive-care unit what kind of effect total cocaine abuse has on the heart and they said things like, "Well, there's not enough valid information...." That kind of answer.

The next time they give you all that civic bullshit about voting, keep in mind that Hitler was elected in a full, free democratic election

That's basically what the drive is: "I want to be famous, I want to be noticed, and I want to be approved of." That's basically what you're after. "Give me attention, give me applause, give me an audience. A. A. A. Straight As." That's all you're looking for.

I never go anywhere or do anything that transports me outside the boundaries of my mind.

I'm 63 now. But that's just 17 Celsius.

Every day I beat my own previous record for the number of consecutive days I’ve stayed alive.

If we could just find out who's in charge, we could kill him.

People who see life as anything more than pure entertainment are missing the point.

So I want to thank the Pentagon, the Soviet Union and the military-industrial complex from the bottom of my heart. Without them, I could never have become the man I am today.

Whereas your blackness, ethnicity, homosexuality is something that might be genetic, I can't touch that, and I have no right.