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

“There was also the fact that sending a penniless writer to get $135 worth of beer was — as Khrushchev said of Nixon — 'like sending a goat to tend the cabbage'.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, quote from Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga


“It is a natural stronghold for them—they can infest this maze of iron and water like a horde of starving cockroaches, and they’ll be just as hard to anticipate and to kill in such close quarters.”
“Wow,” Shane said. “You really know how to drum up team spirit. Did you print up Team Total Fail jerseys, too?” Myrnin gave him an entirely crazy smile. “Would you be surprised if I had?”
― Rachel Caine, quote from Black Dawn


“This hasn’t been a conversation, Bobby Tom. You haven’t said one single thing that matters.” She”
― Susan Elizabeth Phillips, quote from Heaven, Texas


“You won't be able to do it wrong, Durnik--any more than you'd be able to lie or cheat or steal. It's built into you to do it right, so don't worry about it."
"That's all very well for you to say, Mistress, Pol," he replied, "but if you don't mind, I will worry about it just a bit--privately of course.”
― David Eddings, quote from Enchanters' End Game


“From Beckett's "The Unnamable":

"They love each other, marry, in order to love each other better, more conveniently, he goes off to the wars, he dies at the wars, she weeps, with emotion, at having loved him, at having lost him, yep, marries again, in order to love again..., more conveniently again, they love each other, you love as many times as necessary, as necessary in order to be happy, he comes back, the other comes back, from the wars, he didn't die at the wars after all, she goes to the station, to meet him, he dies in the train, of emotion, at the thought of seeing her again, having her again, she weeps, weeps again, with emotion again, at having lost him again, yep, goes back to the house, he's dead, the other is dead, the mother-in-law takes him down, he hanged himself, with emotion, at the thought of losing her, she weeps, weeps louder, at having loved him, at having lost him, there's a story for you, that was to teach me the nature of emotion, that's called emotion, what emotion can do, given favourable conditions, what love can do, well well, so that's emotion, that's love, and trains, and the nature of trains, and the meaning of...”
― Samuel Beckett, quote from Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable


Interesting books

Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind
(1K)
Evolve Your Brain: T...
by Joe Dispenza
Echoes
(7.7K)
Echoes
by Danielle Steel
Attraction
(15.3K)
Attraction
by Penny Reid
The Complete Oz
(3.1K)
The Complete Oz
by L. Frank Baum
Fisher's Light
(7K)
Fisher's Light
by Tara Sivec
What We Buried
(658)
What We Buried
by Caitlyn Siehl

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.