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If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win.

Mel Brooks

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Mel Brooks
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: June 28
Actor
Composer
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Journalist
Librettist
Lyricist
Screenwriter
Soldier
Songwriter
Stage Actor
Brooklyn
New York
Melvin Brooks
Melvin Kaminsky
Never
Soapbox
Dictator
Rhetoric
Trade
Stand
Winning

More quotes by Mel Brooks

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Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.
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Everything we do in life is based on fear, especially love.
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I don't have a mission. I don't have a torch to burn.
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I make people laugh for a living. I believe I can say objectively that what I do I do as well as anybody. Just say I'm one of the best broken field runners that ever lived. For 35 years I was a cult hero, an underground funny.
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My favorite expression is: When you go up to the bell, ring it ? or don't go up to the bell.
Mel Brooks
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I like people with big talents and small neuroses - not always an easy combination to find. I've discovered that if the neurosis is too big, it diminishes the talent and you wind up working too hard for what you get.
Mel Brooks
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Not only should we laugh about Hitler. We must laugh about him. Especially in Berlin.
Mel Brooks
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Immortality is a by-product of good work. Masterpieces are not for artists, they're for critics. Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together. My message to the world is 'Let's swing, sing, shout, make noise! Let's not mimic death before our time comes! Let's be wet and noisy!'
Mel Brooks
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All short women have a delayed fuse. Marry a taller woman: My wife was an inch or two taller than me it's a sign of security.
Mel Brooks
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Being brave is being scared and worried and still doing it [what you do]. Because if you're just a wacko, a mashugana, a crazy guy, then you're not brave, your nuts!
Mel Brooks
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THE 2,000-YEAR-OLD MAN'S SECRETS OF LONGEVITY 1. Don't run for a bus - there'll always be another. 2. Never, ever touch fried food. 3. Stay out of a Ferrari or any other small Italian car. 4. Eat fruit - a nectarine - even a rotten plum is good.
Mel Brooks
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There's an army story in me, and I think there's a WWII Brooks film somewhere.
Mel Brooks
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Hope for the Best. Expect the worst. Life is a play. We're unrehearsed.
Mel Brooks
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Good taste is the enemy of comedy.
Mel Brooks
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Directing is a terrible, anxious process. It's all collaboration, and if you have a dream, it's diluted very quickly by the slightest ineptness in any of your collaborators. They're supposed to help you, but too often they help you into your grave.
Mel Brooks
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Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.
Mel Brooks
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The thing is to be brave and move the audience with you, instead of cater to the lowest common denominator, you know, slipping on a banana peel and falling on your ass. You got to move the audience a little further ahead in terms of their appreciation of what is comedy. It's complicated.
Mel Brooks
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It would be hypocritical of me to take issue with anything in questionable taste, seeing that I invented bad taste in films.
Mel Brooks
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We want to get people laughing we don't want to offend anybody.
Mel Brooks
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I have always been a huge admirer of my own work. I'm one of the funniest and most entertaining writers I know.
Mel Brooks