Quote

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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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
Song
Tempted
Write
George
Problem
Bush
Writing
Figure
Would
Figures
Couldn
Sort
Puppeteers
Funny
Puppeteer

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I wasn't really a performer by temperament.
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You can make fun with Saddam Hussein jokes ... but you can't make fun of, say, the concentration camps. I think my target was not so much evil, but benign stupidity people doing stupid things without realising or, instead, thinking they were doing good.
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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.
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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.
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If the hoods don't get you, the monoxide will.
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I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity.
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Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way.
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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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Everything is so weird in politics that it's very hard to be funny about it, I think.
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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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