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I've heard it quoted that I was dead. You can't believe anything you read. That was just an off-hand remark somebody picked up, and now it's been quoted and quoted, and therefore misquoted.

Tom Lehrer

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Tom Lehrer
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 9
Lyricist
Mathematician
Pianist
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
University Teacher
New York City
New York
Thomas Andrew Lehrer
Thomas Lehrer
Dead
Somebody
Hand
Misquoted
Heard
Quoted
Read
Remark
Hands
Remarks
Anything
Picked
Believe
Therefore

More quotes by Tom Lehrer

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Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down ? That's not my department.
Tom Lehrer
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The audience usually has to be with you, I'm afraid. I always regarded myself as not even preaching to the converted, I was titillating the converted.
Tom Lehrer
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When correctly viewed, everything is lewd.
Tom Lehrer
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Everything is so weird in politics that it's very hard to be funny about it, I think.
Tom Lehrer
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My last public performance for money was in 1967. For free, it was 1972, with the exception of two little one-shot, one-song things. But that's just for friends, out of friendship for the people involved, and also because it was fun.
Tom Lehrer
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I'm very proud of myself on my, whatever the literacy is, I'm pretentious, totally pretentious. I like to say 'hmm', for example.
Tom Lehrer
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I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record.
Tom Lehrer
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Once all the Germans were warlike and mean But that couldn't happen again We taught them a lesson in nineteen eighteen And they've hardly bothered us since then
Tom Lehrer
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I wasn't really a performer by temperament.
Tom Lehrer
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For there is surely nothing more beautiful in this world than the sight of a lone man facing single-handedly a half a ton of angry pot roast!
Tom Lehrer
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The audiences like to think that satire is doing something. But, in fact, it is mostly to leave themselves satisfied. Satisfied rather than angry, which is what they should be.
Tom Lehrer
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Disclaimer: If anyone disagrees with anything I say, I am quite prepared to not only retract it, but also to deny under oath I ever said it.
Tom Lehrer
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The people who came to hear me perform or to buy my records were not the type who would be offended [by the song 'The Vatican Rag']. But I gather that there were other people who were offended.
Tom Lehrer
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Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.
Tom Lehrer
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Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. It's always seemed to me that this is precisely the sort of dynamic, positive thinking that we so desperately need today in these trying times of crisis and universal brouhaha.
Tom Lehrer
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The reason most folksongs are so atrocious is that they were written by the people.
Tom Lehrer
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I'm not tempted to write a song about George W.Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them. And that's not funny.
Tom Lehrer
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In one word he told me the secret of success in mathematics: plagiarize only be sure always to call it . . . research.
Tom Lehrer
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Alas, irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness, at least in the so-called mass media. What we have now - to quote myself at my most pretentious - is a nimiety of scurrility with a concomitant exiguity of taste.
Tom Lehrer
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I ache for the touch of your lips dear, but much more for the touch of your whips dear.
Tom Lehrer