Quotes

The trap is man's armored character structure and there's only one way out of it. It's not drugs and it's not religion and it's not politics. It's going back to the old apple tree and trying to do better than Adam and Eve did.

[on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962), 2/56/76, about his pierced left ear] What the hell? I think, you know, if a pirate can wear an earring, why can't I wear an earring? Why should we be the only male of a species that isn't into adornment?

[on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962), 5/25/78, about his pierced left ear] I say it's for purposes of self-adornment. That's all. And, you know, we are the only species in life where the male is less grand than the female.

[referring to one of the world's deadliest snakes] The Gaboon Viper, so named because it bites you on the gaboon.

[on Dick Shawn] I never liked him and I never found him funny. I was also jealous of him because he got parts I wanted to do. I don't know. I never warmed up to Dick Shawn. I found him arrogant. I remember one time I rode in an elevator with Henry Fonda. I was a young comic. He kind of gave me hard eyes and brushed me off and for years I told people what a prick he was. Then I got to spend a week with him and he was wonderful. I had the most wonderful week with him! And I had bad-mouthed him after being in an elevator with him. I thought, "What the fuck was I thinking?" I formed an opinion that had nothing to do with anything. So I don't know . . .

[on Red Skelton] Red Skelton I loved. He was an angel. When I was a young comic he was so generous with me. He walked in on a live show I was doing at the Blue Angel and got a big laugh. He threw his arm around me and he was sweet as sugar. Of course, I had adored him in The Fuller Brush Man (1948) and all the movies. Liberace was another. People would do that. They would walk into your show and people would laugh and applaud. That's what Bob Hope used to do with [Johnny Carson].

TV used to bring people together in the days of Kunta Kinte and Roots (1977). Now it's separating people. Even in sports, if the is 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. Instead they have to rear the ugly head of politics by kneeling instead of standing. So it's changed, and not for the better.

In the days of "Hey, hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?", that's nothing compared to the vitriol of today. So people basically shut up. at least until they get into the ballot box. That's why you can't trust the polls.

In the fifties, there was the blacklist, the Hollywood Ten. There was something that preceded it, that to my knowledge has never been written about, which was a group of communists or actors who they could persuade to become communists in their movies and there was a lot of bitterness on the part of right-wing actors that they were blacked out of a lot of these movies, and this preceded the left-wing blacklist that happened because there were these communist directors who were blacklisting not just right-wingers, but non-communists, and out this came rage on the part of the right, and they began to call anyone who didn't agree with them a communist.

All these kids that are getting brainwashed in college are going to become the CEOs and the mayors of cities and governors and , ultimately presidents. They are what they are because of all of these Marxist professors. The deplorables in flyover country are not going to run for office or become heads of companies., so they're having an immediate effect by voting, but I don't see how in the long range how we're going to change this. All of our leaders of industry and politics are of a left-wing bent.