History is not reassuring on the subject of the longevity of seemingly lasting great nations, is it?
DICK CAVETTWhile 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.
More Dick Cavett Quotes
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It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.
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I am always shocked that there are still a handful of defenders of the dubious practice of abstinence, surely the worst idea since chocolate-covered ants.
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I’ll be happy if I can just stay out of Nebraska.
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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.
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The brain process that results in a joke materializing where no joke was before remains a mystery. I’m not aware of any scholarly, scientific or neurological studies on the subject.
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I haven’t ever found any great writing on that wonderful and often unappreciated art form, the insult.
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I’m the only talk show host, I think, if there’s such a category in, what’s called, the book of records, to have a guest die while we were taping the show, yeah.
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Every time I nostalgically try to regain my liking of John McCain, he reaches into his sleaze bag and pulls out something malodorous.
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Does anything show the complexity of the miraculous brain more than that weird curiosity, the sleep-protection dream?
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Home schooling as an idea is on a par with home dentistry.
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The trick to writing for people is, you have to be able to turn them on in your head. And know how they’d word something or how they’d inflect it.
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It’s not always easy to identify your own voice. It comes with time.
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Sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought to sloppy legislation.
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I hate Danny Kaye movies.
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I don’t see the future as bright, language-wise. I see it as a glass half empty – and evaporating quickly.
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Why are sex and violence always linked? I’m afraid they’ll blur together in people’s minds – sexandviolence – until we can’t tell them apart. I expect to hear a newscaster say, “The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex.”
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I guess the best advice I ever got or anyone could get for doing a talk show, though it has not been easy very often, was from Jack Paar, who said, ‘Kid, don’t make it an interview. Interviews have clipboards, and you’re like David Frost. Make it a conversation.’
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There’s so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?
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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.
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I don’t think anyone ever gets over the surprise of how differently one audience’s reaction is from another.
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It’s no fun being a specimen.
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An effective speaker can do more damage or more good in a well-stated minute than an angry klutz could do in half an hour.
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I did standup while still working for Johnny Carson in the mid-’60s, thus gaining the advantage of at least getting laughs from him about how I hadn’t the night before.
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There should be three days a week when no one is allowed to say: ‘What’s your sign?’ Violators would have their copies of Kahlil Gibran confiscated.
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Coming up through the ranks of any calling can be rough, but that battered soul who survives the early years of courting the comic muse comes close to knowing what only the soldier knows: What combat is like.
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Commercials are not the only exposure that obesity gets on TV. It is by no means a rarity on the wonderful Judge Judy’s show when both plaintiff and accused all but literally fill the screen.
DICK CAVETT