Quotes from Steve Allen

Without laughter life on our planet would be intolerable. So important is laughter to us that humanity highly rewards members of one of the most unusual professions on earth, those who make a living by inducing laughter in others. This is very strange if you stop to think of it: that otherwise sane and responsible citizens should devote their professional energies to causing others to make sharp, explosive barking-like exhalations.

I'm all for sex. Seven nights a week. Days, too.

If there is a God, the phrase that must disgust him is "holy war".

This is The Tonight Show. I can't tell you too much about it, other than the fact that this program is going to go on forever.

Religious believers of the world, you are free to continue to debate the simple, narrow question that divides you from atheists, but you have no right, in so doing, to treat the Humanists of the world with contempt. You owe them a deep debt of gratitude, for not only have they shed much light on a naturally dark world but they have very probably helped civilize your own specific religion.

To those who wish to punish others -- or at least to see them punished, if the avengers are too cowardly to take matters in to their own hands -- the belief in a fiery, hideous hell appears to be a great source of comfort.

Thousands of years ago only Christ could walk on the water. Today anybody can do it; you just step on the garbage.

No actual tyrant known to history has ever been guilty of one-hundredth of the crimes, massacres, and other atrocities attributed to the Deity in the Bible.

In a rational society we would want our presidents to be teachers. In our actual society we insist that they be cheerleaders.

Laughter would appear to be a physical reflex, although even if it is, this still leaves unanswered the question of why the human response to humor is a convulsive spasm of the respiratory mechanism rather than a crossing of the eyes or a waving of the arms.

That our nation is in the throes of a moral collapse of serious dimensions is, apparently, no longer a debatable conclusion. Liberal and conservative spokesmen vie to see who shall express the conviction most vigorously. Churchmen and secularists, too, agree that we have fallen upon evil days. These various groups naturally differ as to the reasons for the situation, but that it exists no one seems prepared to deny.

One of the nice things about problems is that a good many of them do not exist except in our imaginations.

Ours is a government of checks and balances. The Mafia and crooked businessmen make out checks, and the politicians and other compromised officials improve their bank balances.

But all seriousness aside

Do not allow children to mix drinks. It is unseemly and they use too much vermouth.

Radio is the theater of the mind; television is the theater of the mindless.

If the Old Testament were a reliable guide in the matter of capital punishment, half the people in the United States would have to be killed tomorrow.

If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.

Humor is a social lubricant that helps us get over some of the bad spots.

Totalitarianism is patriotism institutionalized.

When my mother passed away several years ago—well, wait a minute. Actually, she didn't 'pass away.' She died. Something about that verb, 'to pass away' always sounds to me as if someone just drifted through the wallpaper. No, my mother did not pass away. She definitely died.

In a rational society we would want our presidents to be teachers. In our actual society we insist they be cheerleaders.

The secret to my success, is that I'm just too dumb to know that I can't do it.

Son of a bitch! You're Steve Allen!