“It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.”

Nobody is going to try to confiscate guns, although some Web sites know better: President Obama, they are certain, wants to.

I’m not all that enthralled by show business, and I’m not that much of a highbrow.

I hate Danny Kaye movies.

In relative youth, we assume we’ll remember everything. Someone should urge the young to think otherwise.

While other kids were out playing and doing healthy things, I read an ancient judo book with a neck hold that was fatal to so many people they finally dropped it from judo.

I have a disturbing problem with losing things. My vulnerability to loss-distress could properly be labeled not only inordinate, but neurotic.

To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.

It’s lamented that the youth get their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It’s lamentable that they get more from them than from the news.

Unpleasant reading on the subject of anger tells us that there’s not really anything wrong with it. In limited amounts. It can even be a good thing. A pressure valve.

It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer’s life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.

The Nixon administration kept a nasty eye on our show… Cops would come by – often just in time to see the act they wanted to see.

I would not ever try to be a show intellectual, which I was accused of doing a while on ABC. I thought you were supposed to read the guests’ books.

You can, after all, reduce the reasons for watching TV to but two: to be lulled, and to be stimulated. Some people do one sometimes, the other sometimes. Some people do all of one or all of the other.

I have never been converted to or even had much interest in spiritualism, occultism, Swedenborgianism or any particular religion. And I never, except occasionally for a laugh, visit the quacks who call themselves psychics.

Every student of comedy should see Dame Edna at least twice.

I haven’t ever found any great writing on that wonderful and often unappreciated art form, the insult.

No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn’t know it.

Happiness depends more upon the internal frame of a person’s own mind, than on the externals in the world.

Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.

To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.

Don’t go on discussing what a good person should be. Just be one.

The person who gives with a smile is the best giver because God loves a cheerful giver.

I’m a really particular person. I want it my way.

You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.