Quotes from Tom Lehrer

Counting in octal is just likst counting in decimal--if you don't use your thumbs.

I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel.

Counting in octal is just like counting in decimal, if you don't use your thumbs.

The people who were in college in the '50s were my first real audience, and their kids, the people who found my records in the cabinet during their 'Mad 'magazine years picked me up also.

I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit.

I have always found it interesting... that there are people who regard copyright infringement as a form of flattery.

If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend or, perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.

I'm not interested in promoting myself or revealing to total strangers anything about me. That's not my job.

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.

I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record.

Oh we will all fry together when we fry. We'll be french fried potatoes by and by. There will be no more misery When the world is our rotisserie, Yes, we will all fry together when we fry.

If a person feels he can't communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.

I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit. Every now and then I wrote something, and every now and then I didn't. The second just outnumbered the first.

It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year.

One of the things I'm proudest of is, on my record 'That Was the Year that Was' in 1965, I made a joke about spending $20 billion sending some clown to the moon. I was against the manned space program then, and I'm even more against it now, that whole waste of money.

No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has "The Truth". To be an atheist is almost as arrogant as to be a fundamentalist. But then again, I can get pretty arrogant.

The real issues I don't think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn't ban landmines.

In my youth there were words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can't say 'girl.'

You can't be satirical and not be offensive to somebody.

I know that thete are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!

I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity.

When someone makes a move Of which we don't approve, Who is it that always intervenes? U.N. and O.A.S., They have their place, I guess, But first send the Marines!

We are the folk song army, every one of us cares. We all hate poverty, war, and injustice unlike the rest of you squares.

San Francisco is a city of twenty-something millionaire white kids named Doug.