“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
George Carlin
Born place: in New York, New York, The United States
Born date May 12, 1937
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“Shoes off in the whale! And don't try and make a break for the anus.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings
“Eric Sevareid, who observed at close range so much of the history of the era and its protagonists, would say nearly forty years later of Truman, “I am not sure he was right about the atomic bomb, or even Korea. But remembering him reminds people what a man in that office ought to be like. It’s character, just character. He stands like a rock in memory now.” • • • He had lived eighty-eight”
― David McCullough, quote from Truman
“Regret hung from the hem of everyone's lives, a rip cord reminder that what you want is not always what you get. Look at himself, outliving Aimee. Or Az, trying to find his daughter, only to have her wind up dead. Look at Shelby, with a child who was dying by degrees. Ethan, born into a body nobody deserves. At some point or another, everyone was failed by this world. Disappointment was the one thin humans had in common.
Taken this way, Ross didn't feel quite so alone. Trapped in your whirlpool of what might have been, you might no be able to drag yourself out - but you could be saved by someone else who reached in.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance
“You see it is important to understand how damaged people don’t always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them. It’s a shame we carry. The shame of wanting something good. The shame of feeling something good. The shame of not believing we deserve to stand in the same room in the same way as all those we admire. Big red As on our chests. I never thought to myself growing up, be a lawyer. An astronaut. The President. A scientist. A doctor. An architect. I didn’t even think, be a writer. Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It’s difficult to think yes. Or up. When all you feel is fight or run.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, quote from The Chronology of Water
“There are an endless number of people who have left a love-shaped hole in the heart of someone else. Eventually someone brave and stupid will come along and try to fill that hole. But it never works, and so instead, that selfless soul winds up with a gap in his heart, too. And so on. It's a miracle that anyone survives, when so much of us is missing.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Leaving Time
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A Dance to the Music...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.
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