Quotes from Lenny Bruce

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.

Liberals can understand everything but people who don't understand them.

I am influenced by every second of my waking hour.

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

There is only what is and that's it. What should be is a dirty lie.

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

Even if you are Catholic, if you live in New York you're Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you are going to be goyish even if you are Jewish.

People are leaving the church and going back to God.

Communism is like one big phone company.

Catholicism is like Howard Johnson, and what they have are these franchises and they give all these people different franchises in the different countries but they have one government, and when you buy the Howard Johnson franchise you can apply it to the geography - whatever's cool for that area - and then you, you know, pay the bread to the main office.

There is nothing sadder than an aging hipster.

I don't want a sharp chick who quotes Kerouac; I just want to hear my old lady say, "Get up and fix the toilet, it's still making noise.

Life is a four-letter word.

must be lonesome, being bright and witty and aware

I don't smoke pot, and I'm glad because then I can champion it without special pleading. The reason I don't smoke it is because it facilitates ideas and heightens sensations-and I've got enough shit flying through my head without smoking pot.

There is only what is.

On his addiction to opiods): I'll die young, but it's like kissing God.

The first great break-through—or, rather, breakdown—of society's nudity/lewdity guilt-by-association was the now-famous Marilyn Monroe calendar. Marilyn's respectability when she died was based principally upon her economic status, which is, in the final analysis, the only type our society really respects.

Excerpt from Kenneth Brown testimony] Great comics throughout literature have always disguised by comedy, through laughter, through jokes, an underlying theme which is very serious, and perhaps needs laughter because it is also painful...

If God made the body, and the body is dirty, then the fault lies with the manufacturer.

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

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.

Guys are like dogs. They keep comin' back. Ladies are like cats. Yell at a cat one time, they're gone.

I think it's about time we gave up religion and got back to God.