Quotes About Clowns

Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred. People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies for fear that they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise. The trickster in most native traditions is essential to creation, to birth.

I'm not down with guns. Jails and morgues are full of feeble clowns who thought that carrying a firearm would compel folks to take them seriously.

He said that academia reminded him of a badly run circus. The faculty members were like underfed animals -- weary of their cages, which were never large enough to begin with -- and they responded sluggishly to the whip. The trapeze artists fell with monotonous regularity into poorly strung nets. The clowns looked hungry. The tent leaked. The crowd was inattentive, shouting incoherently at inappropriate moments. And when the show was over, no one cheered.

Clowns—feh! All that ghastly, forced gaiety, worse than New Year's Eve.

In the Stephen Sondheim song, when something bad happens in the circus, they send in the clowns. In America's political circus, they send in the lawyers.

and I laugh, I can still laugh, who can't laugh when the whole thing is so ridiculous that only the insane, the clowns, the halfwits, the cheaters, the whores, the horseplayers, the bankrobbers, the poets... are interesting?

If ever I have the time, I'm going to write a book about beauty and pain. They're so alike in so many ways: neither of them really exist, but both of them are strong enough to override the strongest human mind and turn wisest and bravest of us all into clowns. Someone who can command beauty and pain – well, they'd have all the bases covered, as we say where I come from.

a nightmarish thing that frightens Love, haunting her, weighing her down, the thing that she's supposed to love, the way the world initially instructs children to love clowns even though we all know deep down that they're creepy, old, puffy men in masks leering at children.

Men without dignity are like clowns without an audience, pathetic and lost

There was a menagerie in which hideous clowns, dressed in rags and come from who knows where, were in 1823 exhibiting to the peasants of Montfermeil one of those hideous Brazilian vultures.

So way back, Jonathan and I were - we were entertainers as kids. We were actors; we did theater, musicals; we ended up getting into commercials and some TV spots. Actually, one of our jobs, we were clowns.

You know," Gacy said, looking at one officer and then the other, "clowns can get away with murder.

What I do know is that I have never found clowns remotely funny. I am not alone in this, I think. More people find clowns disturbing or distressing rather than raucously amusing. Is it that the nature of human existence has changed so radically in the last century or so that what was funny to our grandparents and great-grandparents is now tragic or terrifying?

Do those clowns really believe what they teach?

But was that why Negroes were poor, because they were dancers, jazzers, clowns? . . . The other way round would be better: dancers because of their poverty; singers because they suffered; laughing all the time because they must forget.... It's more like that, thought Sandy.

Take the Tea Party. I get it. They're a playground team with staunch work ethics and sincere values, and they're sick of watching all these lazy, political clowns throw away their hard-earned tax dollars. On the other hand are the Occupiers, the other playground team who's furious that the top one percent hire a bunch of lobbyists to bribe those same clowns and tilt the chessboard.

I was obsessed with clowns. My dad had to get rid of them. I thought there were clowns under my bed for years.

and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious.

I'm dealing with fools and trolls and soft targets. It's just strafing runs in my underwear before my first cup of coffee. I don't have time for these clowns.

Hee hee hee!" Nero said. "You children are like three clowns!" "Ho ho ho!" Count Olaf said. "Ha ha ha!" Violet said, who was beginning to feel queasy from faking all this laughter.

'Occupy' is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.

We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken.

I realise that I do not change the course of history. I am an actor, I do a movie, that's the end of it. You have to realise we are just clowns for hire. After I had success it was great, at first, not to worry about money. It was on my mind when I was growing up.

Clowns work as well as aspirin, but twice as fast.