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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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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
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Littles
Friends
Performance
Little
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Last
Performances
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Friendship
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Fun

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I ache for the touch of your lips dear, but much more for the touch of your whips dear.
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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.
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When correctly viewed, everything is lewd.
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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.
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I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!
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If I can't get people to commit themselves on whether or not there is a square root of two, then I won't touch on God or anything here
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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.
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But in the new (math) approach, the important thing is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer.
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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!
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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.
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Everything is so weird in politics that it's very hard to be funny about it, I think.
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In my youth there were words you couldn't say in front of a girl now you can't say 'girl.'
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Don't solicit for your sister, it's not nice. Unless you get a good percentage of her price.
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Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.
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Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way.
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The reason most folksongs are so atrocious is that they were written by the people.
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Step up and shake the hand Of someone you can't stand, You can tolerate him if you try!
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I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity.
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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.
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