Lenny Bruce Quotes

The only honest art form is laughter.

There’s nothing sadder than an aging hipster.

Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.

The role of the comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.

I won’t say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I’m Going to Be If I Grow Up.

The ‘what should be’ never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no ‘what should be’, there is only what is.

The liberals can understand everything but people who don’t understand them.

The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What’s that, a bonus?

Don’t you know that there ain’t no devil, it’s just god when he’s drunk?

If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.

You gotta have heart. Miles and miles of heart.

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.

If you can take bullshit, there ain’t nothing you can’t take.

Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government’.

A lot of people say to me ‘Why did you kill Christ?’ I dunno, it was one of those parties, got out of hand, you know.

If I’d walked around and said I was the emperor of the world, they’d say ‘he’s a nice Jewish kid from Long Island.

I think the idea that you can go this way or that way in politics is propounded only by liberals.

I hate small towns because once you’ve seen the cannon in the park there’s nothing else to do.

The real reason I’m a comic is because of my deep-rooted existential angst that no amount of therapy will ever cure.

You know what’s happened to the American Dream? It’s come true in Cleveland.

The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can’t fake it… try to fake three laughs in an hour — ha ha ha ha ha — they’ll take you away, man. You can’t.

If you can’t say ‘fuck’, you can’t say ‘fuck the government’.

The thing that’s wrong with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.

I am, as I am; whether hideous, or beautiful, or neither, it is as it is.

They call it American roulette but I’m the only one that ever seems to get shot.

Guys are like dogs. They keep coming back. Ladies are like cats. Yell at a cat one time…they’re gone.

I’m not a comedian. I’m Lenny Bruce.

If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.

I’ll die young, but it’s like kissing God.

Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government.’

I won’t say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I’m Going to Be If I Grow Up.

I’m what you may call a collector of experiences.

I moved with only the essentials – a typewriter, a cat and endless dreams of mediocre success.

In the Halls of Justice, the only justice is in the halls.

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the bread-line right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.

I won’t say ours was a tough school, but we had our own fight song.

The effectiveness of all advertising is based upon the Lemming Factor. Characteristics of The Buck and The Duck, as each case may be.

Art keeps up with life’s changes.

Miami, tropical narcissism of nowhere from the madmen that this thing is progressing.

I, like, I was gonna get a gun and try and shoot him. But I thought, ‘No, they’ll kill me after’, you know. They’ll capture me and kill me.

The reason we have a stipulation in our contract that you can’t lose us money is symbolic of the principle you can’t fire us.

There was a good news story on TV. A couple had solved the problem of human-run traffic lights that gum up the streets because they’re color-blind. They live in Bridgeport. I said, ‘What an incredibly intelligent solution found by great people’. Then I said, ‘Gee, they must be Jews’. I looked, ‘sure enough, they were. Why aren’t there any dumb Jews?’ I thought; I said, ‘Well, ’cause all the dumb ones got in thirty years ago when the getting was good’.

Listen to the quiet voice within you, for it tells you what you should do.

I don’t know whether many of you have who has met saints, but one time a three-foot saint came up to me and tapped me on the shoulder. And I said ‘What’s on your mind, small person?’ And he said ‘I am offering you my wisdom, Lenny Bruce, for $300’.