Quotes from Last Words

George Carlin ·  297 pages

Rating: (10.2K votes)


“But when you're in front of an audience and you make them laugh at a new idea, you're guiding the whole being for the moment. No one is ever more him/herself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are down. It's very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open, completely themselves when that message hits the brain and the laugh begins. That's when new ideas can be implanted. If a new idea slips in at that moment, it has a chance to grow.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words


“The larger the group, the more toxic, the more of your beauty as an individual you have to surrender for the sake of group thought. And when you suspend your individual beauty you also give up a lot of your humanity. You will do things in the name of a group that you would never do on your own. Injuring, hurting, killing, drinking are all part of it, because you've lost your identity, because you now owe your allegiance to this thing that's bigger than you are and that controls you.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words


“Fuck the drug war. Dropping acid was a profound turning point for me, a seminal experience. I make no apologies for it. More people should do acid. It should be sold over the counter.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words


“Abraham Maslow said that the fully realized person transcends his local group and identifies with the species. But the election of Ronald Reagan might've been the beginning of my giving up on my species. Because it was absurd. To this day it remains absurd. More than absurd, it was frightening: it represented the rise to supremacy of darkness, the ascendancy of ignorance.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words


“So I want to thank the Pentagon, the Soviet Union and the military-industrial complex from the bottom of my heart. Without them, I could never have become the man I am today.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words



“People are wonderful one at a time. Each one of them has an entire hologram of the universe somewhere within them.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words


“So I do have this ambivalence. Obviously I'm against militaries, because of what militaries do. In many ways though, the air force was unmilitary-like. They dropped bombs on people, but...they had a golf course.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words


“The habits of liberals, their automatic language, their knee-jerk responses to certain issues, deserved the epithets the right wing stuck them with. I'd see how true they often were. Here they were, banding together in packs, so I could predict what they were going to say about some event or conflict and it wasn't even out of their mouths yet. I was very uncomfortable with that. Liberal orthodoxy was as repugnant to me as conservative orthodoxy.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words


“The reason I prefer the sledgehammer to the rapier and the reason I believe in blunt, violent, confrontational forms for the presentation of my ideas is because I see that what’s happening to the lives of people is not rapierlike, it is not gentle, it is not subtle. It is direct, hard and violent. The slow violence of poverty, the slow violence of untreated disease. Of unemployment, hunger, discrimination. This isn’t the violence of some guy opening fire with an Uzi in a McDonald’s and forty people are dead. The real violence that goes on every day, unheard, unreported, over and over, multiplied a millionfold.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words


Video

About the author

George Carlin
Born place: in New York, New York, The United States
Born date May 12, 1937
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“Bones informed dryly, watching him arrange his study tools just perfectly. You know there is a name for what you're doing. I believe it's called ... Bones tapped his temple. Something, something, disorder. "Very funny," Reginald muttered in a sing song tone. "You should try actually paying attention when I study. If you did, you'd know it's called obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD, but that's not what I'm doing. This is simply me being exactly orderly." Right.”
― Lucian Bane, quote from Reginald Bones: Part One


“A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race - and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.”
― Ayn Rand, quote from The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism


“Alas, madame!" exclaimed Athos, "to-day love is like war--the breastplate is becoming useless.”
― Alexandre Dumas, quote from Twenty Years After


“...all this convinced him that he had come to one of those revolting havens where pathetic depravity makes its abode, born of tawdry education and the terrible populousness of the capital. One of those havens where man blasphemously crushes and derides all the pure and holy that adorns life, where woman, the beauty of the world, the crown of creation, turns into some strange, ambiguous being, where, along with purity of soul, she loses everything feminine and repulsively adopts all the mannerisms and insolence of a man, and ceases to be that weak, that beautiful being so different from us.”
― Nikolai Gogol, quote from The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol


“Now come on. Let's find the baby unicorns and get out of here.”
― Holly Black, quote from Zombies Vs. Unicorns


Interesting books

Kiss of Steel
(9.1K)
Kiss of Steel
by Bec McMaster
Futures and Frosting
(23.4K)
Futures and Frosting
by Tara Sivec
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
(18.4K)
The Ascent of Money:...
by Niall Ferguson
A Well-Tempered Heart
(6.3K)
A Well-Tempered Hear...
by Jan-Philipp Sendker
Trouble
(17.7K)
Trouble
by Samantha Towle
The Demonologist: The Extraordinary Career of Ed and Lorraine Warren
(4.2K)

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.