Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

George Carlin, fully George Denis Patrick Carlin

American Stand-up Comedian, Social Critic, Actor, and Author, won five Grammy Awards for his Comedy Albums

"Comedy is a socially acceptable form of hostility. That is what comics do, stand the world upside down."

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."

"By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. "

"Religion is just mind control. "

"Think off-center. "

"No. No, there's no God, but there might be some sort of an organizing intelligence, and I think to understand it is way beyond our ability. It's certainly not a judgmental entity. It's certainly not paternalistic and all these qualities that have been attributed to God. It's probably a dispassionate... That's why I say, "Suppose He doesn't give a shit? Suppose there is a God but He just doesn't give a shit?" That's the kind of thing that might be at work."

"‘On the fritz’ is a useful expression only if you're talking about a home appliance. You wouldn't say, "the space shuttle is on the fritz." You'd never hear it in a hospital. "Doctor, the heart-lung machine in on the fritz.""

"A cat will blink when struck with a hammer."

"A conflicted feeling. I'm really a populist, down in the very center of me. I like the power people can accrue for themselves, and I like the idea of user-generated content and taking power from the corporations. The other half of the conflict, though, is that, traditionally speaking, artists are protected from copyright infringement. Fortunately, I don't have to worry about solving this issue. It's someone else's job. [On his work appearing on the Internet]"

"A demilitarized zone sounds like a good idea, but I've noticed that wherever they have a demilitarized zone, there are always a lot of soldiers nearby."

"A flag is supposed to represent everything that a country does. It doesn't only represent the good things. If you burn the flag, you're burning the flag for what you perceive to be the bad things the country has done. It's only a symbol. It's only a piece of cloth."

"A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff."

"A lot of the people who keep a gun at home for safety are the same ones who refuse to wear a seat belt."

"Here's all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid."

"isn't in god's divine plan. What do you want him to do? Change his plan? Just for you? Doesn't it seem a little arrogant? It's a divine plan. What's the use of being god if every run-down schmuck with a two dollar prayer book"

"A small town is any place too poor to have its own insane asylum."

"A radio commercial says that a certain diet pill works three times faster than starvation. Question: Are they guessing or did they really run those tests?"

"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."

"After "Jammin' In New York", I went from a comedian who wrote his own material to a writer who performed his own material... I became socially conscious, and found I had something to say that wasn't too common."

"A lot of times when they catch a guy who killed twenty-seven people, they say, "He was a loner." Well of course he was a loner, he killed everyone he came in contact with."

"A lot of times when a package says Open Other End, I purposely open the end where it says that"

"Actually this is just a place for my stuff, ya know? That's all, a little place for my stuff. That's all I want, that's all you need in life, is a little place for your stuff, ya know? I can see it on your table, everybody's got a little place for their stuff. This is my stuff, that's your stuff, that'll be his stuff over there. That's all you need in life, a little place for your stuff. That's all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. You can see that when you're taking off in an airplane. You look down, you see everybody's got a little pile of stuff. All the little piles of stuff. And when you leave your house, you gotta lock it up. Wouldn't want somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. They always take the good stuff. They never bother with that crap you're saving. All they want is the shiny stuff. That's what your house is, a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get... more stuff! Sometimes you gotta move, gotta get a bigger house. Why? No room for your stuff anymore."

"A woman told me her child was autistic, and I thought she said artistic. So I said, 'Oh great. I'd like to see some of the things he's done."

"After eating, do amphibians need to wait an hour before getting OUT of the water?"

"About the only intelligent thing the British ever did was putting that drivers's seat right over there by the curb where it belongs. Of course then they went and moved the curb to the wrong side of the street."

"Age is a hell of a price to pay for wisdom."

"Although the photographer and the art thief were close friends, neither had ever taken the other's picture."

"All patriarchal societies are either preparing for war, at war, or recovering from war."

"Also, crippled people are crippled. They are not differently-abled. If you insist on using such tortured language as differently-abled, then you must use it on all of us. We're all differently-abled. You can do things I can't do. I can do things you can't do. I can pick my nose with my thumb. I can switch hands while masturbating and gain a stroke. We are all differently-abled. Crippled people are crippled. It's a perfectly honorable word. There is no shame in it. It's in the Bible: "Jesus healed the cripples". He didn't “engage in rehabilitative strategies for the physically disadvantaged”."

"Age is a very high price to pay for maturity."

"All music is the blues. All of it."

"And although I broke a lot of laws as a teenager, I straightened out immediately upon turning eighteen, when I realized the state had a legal right to execute me."

"Always do whatever's next."

"Americans love to eat. They are fatally attracted to the slow death of fast food... This country is big-time pig time... Change the bald eagle to a big bowl of macaroni and cheese. A big bowl. 'Cause everything in this country is king size, extra large and super jumbo. Especially the fucking people! Have you seen some of the people in this country? Have you taken a good look at some of these big, fat motherfuckers walking around? Big fat motherfuckers! Oh, my God. Huge piles of redundant protoplasm, lumbering through the malls like a fleet of interstate buses. The people in this country are immense. Massive bellies, monstrous thighs, and big fat fucking asses! Next time you're in the vicinity of one of these creatures, stand there for a minute and observe. And if you stand there for a minute you'll begin to wonder, "How does this woman take a shit?" How does she shit? And more frightening still, how does she wipe her ass? Can she even locate her asshole? She must require assistance. Are paramedics trained in this field?"

"And don't forget all those 'freedom-loving people around the world who look to us as a beacon of hope.' Those, I assume, would be the ones we haven't bombed lately."

"An art thief is a man who takes pictures."

"And then there are the times when the wolves are silent and the moon is howling."

"And now, in the interest of equal time, here is a message from the National Institute of Pancakes: It reads, and I quote, “Fuck waffles.”"

"And off we go, out onto the highway looking for a little fun. Perhaps a flatbed truck loaded with human cadavers will explode in front of a Star Trek reunion. One can only dream and hope."

"And here's something else, another problem you might have: Suppose your prayers aren't answered. What do you say? "Well, it's God's will." "Thy Will Be Done." Fine, but if it's God's will, and He's going to do what He wants to anyway, why the fuck bother praying in the first place? Seems like a big waste of time to me! Couldn't you just skip the praying part and go right to His Will? It's all very confusing."

"And the other two-way word is "prick". It's okay if it happens to your finger; yes, you can prick your finger, but don't finger your prick!"

"And you know, I always wanted to work in a delicatessen just so that a woman would come in one day and ask me to give her some tongue. And I'd say "Well, I don't get off 'till four o'clock." And she'd say "Well, I don't get off at all. That's why I'm looking for some tongue!""

"And what can we do to silence these Christian athletes who thank Jesus whenever they win, never mention his name when they lose? Not a word. You never hear them say "Jesus made me drop the ball." "The good lord tripped me up behind the line of scrimmage." According to these guys Jesus is undefeated, meanwhile these assholes are in last place. Must be another one of those "miracles.""

"And, of course, the funniest food of all, kumquats."

"Any time marketers add a 'y' to the name of a food, you can be sure they're yanking your schwantz. 'Real chocolatey goodness.' Translation? No fuckin' chocolate!"

"And you might have noticed something else. The sanctity of life doesn't seem to apply to cancer cells, does it? You rarely see a bumper sticker that says 'Save the tumors.'. Or 'I brake for advanced melanoma.'. No, viruses, mold, mildew, maggots, fungus, weeds, E. Coli bacteria, the crabs. Nothing sacred about those things. So at best the sanctity of life is kind of a selective thing. We get to choose which forms of life we feel are sacred, and we get to kill the rest. Pretty neat deal, huh? You know how we got it? We made the whole fucking thing up!"

"As far as I’m concerned, humans have not yet come up with a belief that’s worth believing."

"As a matter of principle, I never attend the first annual anything."

"As far as calling them "Americans" is concerned, do I even have to point out where the insult is? Jesus Holy Shit Christ! We steal their hemisphere, kill 20 or so million of them, destroy five hundred separate cultures, herd the survivors onto the worst land we could find, and now we want to name them after ourselves? It's appalling. Haven't we done enough damage? Do we have to further degrade them by tagging them with the repulsive name of their conquerors? And as far as these classroom liberals who insist on saying "Native American" is concerned, here's something they should be told: it's not up to you to name people and tell them what they should be called. If you'd leave the classroom once and a while, you'd find that most Indians are insulted by the term Native American. The American Indian Movement will tell you that if you ask them. The Phrase "Native American" was invented by the US government Department of the Interior in 1970. In is an inventory term used to keep track of people. It includes Hawaiians, Eskimos, Samoans, Micronesians, Polynesians, and Aleuts. Anyone who uses the term Native American is assisting the US government in its effort to obliterate people's true identities. Do you want to know what the Indians would really like to be called? Their real names: Adirondack, Delaware, Massachuset, Narraganset, Potomac, Illinois, Miami, Alabama, Ottawa, Waco, Wichita, Mojave, Shasta, Yuma, Erie, Huron, Susquehanna, Natchez, Mobile, Yakima, Wallawalla, Muskogee, Spokan, Iowa, Missouri, Omaha, Kansa, Biloxi, Dakota, Hatteras, Klamath, Caddo. Tillamook, Washoe, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, Laguna, Santa Ana, Winnebago, Pecos, Cheyenne, Menominee, Yankton, Apalachee, Chinook, Catawba, Santa Clara, Taos, Arapaho, Black foot, Blackfeet, Chippewa, Cree, Mohawk, Tuscaroro, Cherokee, Seminole, , Choctaw, Chickasaw, Comanche, Shoshone, Two Kettle, Sans Arc, Chiricahua, Kiowa, Mescalero, Navajo, Nez Perce, Potawatomi, Shanee, Pawnee, Chickahominy, Flathead, Santee, Assiniboin, Oglala, Miniconjou, Osage, Crow, Brule', Hunkpapa, Pima, Zuni, Hopi, Paiute, Creek, Kickapoo, Ojibwa, Shinnicock."

"As it stands right now, I lead Richard Pryor in heart attacks, two to one. However, Richard still leads me, one to nothing, in burning yourself up."