Lenny Bruce > Quotes

“There are never enough 'I love you's.”
― Lenny Bruce

“If you can't say "Fuck" you can't say, "Fuck the government.”
― Lenny Bruce

“Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.”
― Lenny Bruce

“If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”
― Lenny Bruce

“The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is.”
― Lenny Bruce

“The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it...try to fake three laughs in an hour -- ha ha ha ha ha -- they'll take you away, man. You can't.”
― Lenny Bruce

“Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.”
― Lenny Bruce, The Essential Lenny Bruce: his original unexpurgated satirical routines

“Liberals can understand everything but people
who don't understand them.”
― Lenny Bruce

“I am influenced by every second of my waking hour. ”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

“You are a white. The Imperial Wizard. Now, if you don't think this is logic you can burn me on the fiery cross. This is the logic: You have the choice of spending fifteen years married to a woman, a black woman or a white woman. Fifteen years kissing and hugging and sleeping real close on hot nights. With a black, black woman or a white, white woman. The white woman is Kate Smith. And the black woman is Lena Horne. So you're not concerned with black or white anymore, are you? You are concerned with how cute or how pretty. Then let's really get basic and persecute ugly people!”
― Lenny Bruce

“If you live in New York, even if you're Catholic, you're Jewish”
― Lennie Bruce

“Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government.”
― Lenny Bruce

“There is only what is and that's it. What should be is a dirty lie.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

“I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like "What I'm Going to be If I Grow Up”
― Lenny Bruce

“Even if you are Catholic, if you live in New York you're Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you are going to be goyish even if you are Jewish.”
― Lenny Bruce

“Communism is like one big phone company.”
― Lenny Bruce

“…Catholicism is like Howard Johnson, and what they have are these franchises and they give all these people different franchises in the different countries but they have one government, and when you buy the Howard Johnson franchise you can apply it to the geography - whatever's cool for that area - and then you, you know, pay the bread to the main office.”
― Lenny Bruce, The Essential Lenny Bruce: his original unexpurgated satirical routines

“People are leaving the church and going back to God.”
― Lenny Bruce

“There is nothing sadder than an aging hipster.”
― Lenny Bruce

“Life is a four-letter word.”
― Lenny Bruce

“must be lonesome, being bright and witty and aware,”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People: An Autobiography

“I don’t want a sharp chick who quotes Kerouac; I just want to hear my old lady say, “Get up and fix the toilet, it’s still making noise.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People: An Autobiography

“إذا كنت تؤمن أنّ هناك من إله، إلهٍ صنع لك جسدك، ولكنّك لازلت تحسب أنّك تستطيع عمل أيّ شيءٍ قذرٍ بذلك الجسد، العيب يقع إذاً في المصنِّع”
― Lenny Bruce

“I don't smoke pot, and I'm glad because then I can champion it without special pleading. The reason I don't smoke it is because it facilitates ideas and heightens sensations-and I've got enough shit flying through my head without smoking pot.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

“The truth is 'what is.' If 'what is' is, you have to sleep eight, ten hours a day, that is the truth. A lie will be: People need no sleep at all. Truth is 'what is.' If every politician from the beginning is crooked, there is no crooked. But if you are concerned with a lie, 'what should be'-and 'what should be' is a fantasy, a terrible, terrible lie that someone gave the people long ago: This is what should be-and no one ever saw what should be, that you don't need any sleep and you can go seven years without sleep, so that all the people were made to measure up to that dirty lie. You know there's no crooked politicians. There's never a lie because there is never a truth.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

“(On his addiction to opiods): I'll die young, but it's like kissing God.”
― Lenny Bruce

“There is only what is.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People: An Autobiography

“The first great break-through—or, rather, breakdown—of society’s nudity/lewdity guilt-by-association was the now-famous Marilyn Monroe calendar. Marilyn’s respectability when she died was based principally upon her economic status, which is, in the final analysis, the only type our society really respects.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People: An Autobiography

“I was not born in a vacuum. Every thought I have belongs to someone else.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

“Marijuana will be legal some day, because the many law students who now smoke pot will some day become Congressmen and legalize it in order to protect themselves.

You wouldn't believe how many people smoke pot. If anyone reading this would like to become mayor, believe me, there is a vast, untapped vote. Of course, you wouldn't want to be the Marijuana Mayor, so you'd have to make it a trick statute, like: 'The Crippled Catholic Jewish War Children in Memory of Ward Bond Who Died for Your Bill to Make Marijuana Legal.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People