"It's the American view that everything has to keep climbing: productivity, profits, even comedy."
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Quote collection
George Carlin quotes (page 43 of 49)
976 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There are actually people who go out and re-fight these battles. You know what I say? Use real ammunition! You just might raise the intelligence level of the American gene pool!"
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"When you look at Earth from that one picture, the one from space, it's really a rather attractive thing. I have nothing against the planet per se. I root for the big comet or asteroid as a way of cleansing the planet. The comet or asteroid 65 million years ago is probably what gave us our opening to replace the reptiles. The greatest entertainment I have in my life is chronicling internally, not necessarily for the public, the slow dissolution of order."
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"I don't consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a skeptic and a realist. But I understand the word "cynic" has more than one meaning, and I see how I could be seen as cynical. "George, you're cynical." Well, you know, they say if you scratch a cynic you find a disappointed idealist. And perhaps the flame still flickers a little, you know?"
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"None of the Christian religions do [interest me]. They're all outer-directed."
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"I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond!"
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"If Helen Keller had psychic ability, would you say she had a fourth sense? What year did Jesus think it was?"
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"When I first heard the song Don't worry - be happy I realized it was exactly the kind of mindless philosophy that Americans would respond to. It would make a great national anthem along with Me first."
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"Language always gives you away."
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"I was a class clown, of the classic term for it. I would get the work done easily, and then I would try to deprive other people of their educations. I developed skills for mimicry, and I was a good showoff. I knew how to get attention, and I knew how to do it in a positive funny way."
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"The dividend I get [from my compulsion] is the freedom to be totally disorderly in my dreamworld."
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"When I'm not actually doing my work, I'm planning it or thinking about it or reading things that on some level are transformed into performance fantasies. I have no active interests."
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"The coke made me incredibly horny."
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"The angles of my body show you an awful lot. I started doing coke to feel open, but by that time, the hole had opened so wide that I'd fallen through. The body language in those photos tells you everything."
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"The enjoyment has been diminishing. Now, there's no question that it's sort of fun to get high."
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"You ever notice that? Any time you see two groups of people who really hate each other, chances are good they're wearing different kind of hats. Keep an eye on that, it might be important."
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"Mother's milk leads to everything."
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"Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game. Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle."
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"Two things happened. The creative side of my career was harmed. When I'd sit down and write under the influence of coke, the ratio of pages kept to pages thrown out declined drastically. But onstage, when rapping about a feeling I already owned, I would sometimes get a burst of eloquence."
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"Anyone who's onstage is going to attract a certain number of misguided people. But I was never very interested in groupies."
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