Tom Lehrer Quotes

67 Sourced Quotes

With audiences nowadays I see it with these late-night people, Jay Leno, David Letterman and so on the audience applauds the jokes rather than laughs at them, which is very discouraging.

Tom Lehrer
Step up and shake the hand
Of someone you can't stand,
You can tolerate him if you try!

Tom Lehrer
I find enough mystery in mathematics to satisfy my spiritual needs. I think, for example, that pi is mysterious enough (don't get me started!) without having to worry about God. Or if pi isn't enough, how about fractals? or quantum mechanics?

Tom Lehrer
So be sweet and kind to mother/
Now and then, have a chat!/
Buy her candy or some flowers or a brand-new hat/
But maybe you best let it go at that!/
Or you may find yourself with a quite complex/
... Com-plex!/
... and.../
You may end up like Oedipus/
I'd rather marry a duck-billed platypus!/
Than end up like poor Oedipus Rex!

Tom Lehrer
On the current state of satire:
Alas, irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness, at least in the so-called mass media. What we have now—to quote myself at my most pretentious—is a nimiety of scurrility with a concomitant exiguity of taste. For example, the freedom (hooray!) to say almost anything you want on television about society's problems has been co-opted (alas!) by the freedom to talk instead about flatulence, orgasms, genitalia, masturbation, etc., etc., and to replace real comment with pop-culture references and so-called "adult" language. Irreverence is easy—what's hard is wit.

Tom Lehrer
Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

Tom Lehrer
I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them. And that's not funny. … OK, well, if I say that, I might get a shock laugh, but it's not really satire.

Tom Lehrer
One of the problems I see with these comics on television, particularly cable television, is, since you can say anything in terms of sex and scatological references and so on, therefore, you should do it. So they all limit themselves to these subjects and this vocabulary. My objection is that it is a lack of articulateness … Irreverence is easy, but what is hard is wit. Wit is what these comedians lack.

Tom Lehrer
You can make fun with Saddam Hussein jokes … but you can't make fun of, say, the concentration camps. I think my target was not so much evil, but benign stupidity people doing stupid things without realising or, instead, thinking they were doing good.

Tom Lehrer
I do have a cause, though. It is obscenity. I'm for it.

Tom Lehrer
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."

Tom Lehrer
A few years ago, a motion picture version appeared of Sophocles' immortal tragedy "Oedipus Rex". This picture played only in the so-called art theaters, and it was not a financial success. And I maintain that the reason it was not a financial success... you're way ahead of me... was that it did not have a title tune which the people could hum, and which would make them actually eager to attend this particular... flick. So, I've attempted to supply this, and here then is the prospective title song from "Oedipus Rex".

Tom Lehrer
The usual jokes about the Army aside, one of the many fine things one has to admit is the way that the Army has carried the American democratic ideal to its logical conclusion, in the sense that not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on the grounds of ability.

Tom Lehrer
I always like to make explicit the fact that before I went off not too long ago to fight in the trenches, I was a mathematician by profession. I don't like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living. I mean, it isn't as though I had to do this, you know, I could be making, oh, 3000 dollars a year just teaching.

Tom Lehrer
What is it that put America in the forefront of the nuclear nations? And what is it that will make it possible to spend twenty billion dollars of your money to put some clown on the moon? Well, it was good old American know how, that's what, as provided by good old Americans like Dr. Wernher von Braun!

Tom Lehrer
He was into animal husbandry—until they caught him at it.

Tom Lehrer
I feel that if any songs are gonna come out of World War III, we'd better start writing them now.

Tom Lehrer
When you attend a funeral,
It is sad to think that sooner o'
Later those you love will do the same for you.
And you may have thought it tragic,
Not to mention other adjec-
Tives, to think of all the weeping they will do.
(But don't you worry.)

Tom Lehrer
Andrew Wiles gently smiles,
Does his thing, and voila!
Q. E. D., we agree,
And we all shout hurrah!
As he confirms what Fermat
Jotted down in that margin,
Which could've used some enlargin'.

Tom Lehrer
There once lived a man named Oedipus Rex,
You may have heard about his odd complex.
His name appears in Freud's index
'Cause he loved his mother.

Tom Lehrer
The loveliest girl in Vienna
Was Alma, the smartest as well.
Once you picked her up on your antenna,
You'd never be free of her spell.

Tom Lehrer
If you're looking for adventure of a new and different kind,
And you come across a Girl Scout who is similarly inclined,
Don't be nervous, don't be flustered, don't be scared. Be prepared!

Tom Lehrer
Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews.

Tom Lehrer
And we will all bake together when we bake.
There'll be nobody present at the wake.
With complete participation
In that grand incineration,
Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak.

Tom Lehrer
All the world seems in tune
On a spring afternoon,
When we're poisoning pigeons in the park.
Every Sunday you'll see
My sweetheart and me,
As we poison the pigeons in the park.

Tom Lehrer