Humorists From The United States

"Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil."

"Every morning I have been looking at CNN to see if there is any reason for hope. I see a few large and impressive peace protests here and there around the world, but mostly I see empty robot faces monotonously reciting the magic incantations, "We must support the President" and "We must support our troops", both of which mean the killing must continue."

"Obviously, the faster we process information, the more rich and complex our models or glosses — our reality-tunnels — will become. Resistance to new information, however, has a strong neurological foundation in all animals, as indicated by studies of imprinting and conditioning. Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show a truly staggering ability to "ignore" certain kinds of information — that which does not "fit" their imprinted/conditioned reality-tunnel. We generally call this "conservatism" or "stupidity", but it appears in all parts of the political spectrum, and in learned societies as well as in the Ku Klux Klan."

"We live in an age of artificial scarcity, maintained by ignorance and fear. The government has been paying farmers not to grow food for fifty years--while millions starve. Labor unions, business and government conspire to hold back the Microprocessor Revolution--because none of them know how to deal with the massive unemployment it will cause. (Fuller's books could tell them.) The utilities advertise continually that "solar power is at least forty years in the future" when my friend Karl Hess, and hundreds of others, already live in largely solar-powered houses. These propaganda advertisements are just a delaying action, because the utilities still haven't figured out how to put a meter between us and the sun."

"A true initiation never ends."

"I'm using myself as a typical 20th century model as I'm trying to make sense out of the world around me … typical in the sense of being one of the damn good models around these days. I am typical in the sense that ...a lot of people are on the same wave length as me. I get fan mail from people that are absolutely stunned that there's somebody else besides themselves who thinks this way. So, we're a minority, but there are a lot of us. On a planet this overcrowded, a minority can have a few million numbers. … More scientific than religious. More open than dogmatic. More optimistic than pessimistic. More future oriented than past oriented. And more humorous than serious. I really dread serious people. Especially serious, dogmatic people. I regard them as sort of what Reich called the emotional plague. I regard them as very dangerous."

"No, they were not exactly automatons, but they did not know what they were doing. They take down a boy’s britches. They stare at his buttocks. They cane him until the buttocks bleed. And they believe this is virtue, because it is done in a school, and it becomes vice only if it is done in a place with a red lantern over the door."

"Every national border in Europe," El Eswad added ironically, "marks the place where two gangs of bandits got too exhausted to kill each other anymore and signed a treaty. Patriotism is the delusion that one of these gangs of bandits is better than all the others."

"The persons we think we are have been manufactured out of some shotgun wedding of history and and imagination."

"It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea."

"The Western World has been brainwashed by Aristotle for the last 2,500 years. The unconscious, not quite articulate, belief of most Occidentals is that there is one map which adequately represents reality. By sheer good luck, every Occidental thinks he or she has the map that fits. Guerrilla ontology, to me, involves shaking up that certainty. I use what in modern physics is called the "multi-model" approach, which is the idea that there is more than one model to cover a given set of facts. As I've said, novel writing involves learning to think like other people. My novels are written so as to force the reader to see things through different reality grids rather than through a single grid. It's important to abolish the unconscious dogmatism that makes people think their way of looking at reality is the only sane way of viewing the world. My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything. If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind. It's only possible to see people when one is able to see the world as others see it. That's what guerrilla ontology is — breaking down this one-model view and giving people a multi-model perspective."

"My early work is politically anarchist fiction, in that I was an anarchist for a long period of time. I'm not an anarchist any longer, because I've concluded that anarchism is an impractical ideal. Nowadays, I regard myself as a libertarian. I suppose an anarchist would say, paraphrasing what Marx said about agnostics being "frightened atheists," that libertarians are simply frightened anarchists. Having just stated the case for the opposition, I will go along and agree with them: yes, I am frightened. I'm a libertarian because I don't trust the people as much as anarchists do. I want to see government limited as much as possible; I would like to see it reduced back to where it was in Jefferson's time, or even smaller. But I would not like to see it abolished. I think the average American, if left totally free, would act exactly like Idi Amin. I don't trust the people any more than I trust the government."

"Beyond a certain point, the whole universe becomes a continuous process of initiation."

"All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense."

"For Halloween, I want to be Lenny Bruce, I want them to hate me, so you can love me on the sly."

"Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham and Cage Lenny Bruce, Langston Hughes, to the stage"

"Lenny Bruce, declares a truce and plays his other hand. Marshall McLuhan, casual viewin', head buried in the sand."

"Lenny Bruce was trying to tell you many things before he died..."

"That's great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane - Lenny Bruce is not afraid."

"Mother Goose is on the loose, stealing lines from Lenny Bruce."

"I want to be Lenny Bruce."

"And I learned the truth from Lenny Bruce, That all my wealth won't buy me health So I smoke a pint of tea a day."

"Oh, the language is a bit loose; It's decidedly not Mother Goose. Outside on the marquee This quotation you'll see: "I was shocked!" and it's signed Lenny Bruce."

"Lenny Bruce (The Establishment) [is] the most original, free-speaking, wild-thinking gymnast of language this inhibited island has ever engaged to amuse its citizens. Mr. Bruce is dark-hatred, dark-suited and American; and the virulent, free-associating manner in which he excoriates the hypocrisies of his compatriots has earned him the epithet "sick." He is in fact pan nihilist, part moralist. He slouches around the stage clutching a microphone, smiling as he improvises, caring as he smiles, seldom repeating in the second show what he said in the first, and always conducting what amounts to a rush job of psychoanalysis on the audience he is addressing. He talks about the nuances of race relations (viz. the white liberals who worship Negroes but somehow never meet them) ... about the techniques of masturbation and the psychological duplicity ("a horny hoax") involved in sleeping with a prostitute; about pain, and laughter, and dying. At times Mr. Bruce drawls and mumbles too privately, lapsing in to a welter of Yiddish phrases borrowed from the show-business world that reared him. ... But at the end he had broken through frontiers of language and feeling that one had hitherto thought inviolable ..."

"They said that he was sick 'cause he didn't play by the rules He just showed the wise men of his day to be nothing more than fools"

"Bruce was a great stage artist, a soloist of unbelievable virtuosity. The thousands of people who filled two houses of an old movie theater in Greenwich Village in December 1963 are a witness of that. So were the audiences that came back night after night during his month in London. The people who followed him were charmed by the free conversational directness of the man. He liked his audiences and took great pains to feel his way towards the individual temperament of each one. And if he felt comfortable with a group there was no end to the effort he would make to entertain and delight them. It’s not really true that he thrived on hostility, though he sometimes managed to put on a show of hard, glittering verve when the animals were in—people who talked loudly throughout his act, sounding "like tape played backwards." But generally an unfriendly audience made him stiff and defiant, and then he would sometimes become brutally dirty, just for the hell of it."

"Just don't forget your history, dirty Lenny died so we could all be free"

"One last four-letter word for Lenny: Dead. At forty. That's obscene."

"Life is a four-letter word."

"In the Halls of Justice, the only justice is in the halls."

"Take away the right to say "fuck" and you take away the right to say "fuck the government.""

", in one of his forensic flights, once described Lenny's hotel as "the on elegant .” The Marlton was, indeed, just a few doors west of Fifth Avenue, but it belonged exclusively to the honky-tonk world of , which it fronted with a façade so narrow-shouldered and a lobby so inconspicuous that you could walk up and down the street for years and never notice this tiny fleabag."

"I'm not a comedian. I'm Lenny Bruce."

"Let me tell you the truth. The truth is what is, and what should be is a fantasy. A terrible, terrible lie that someone gave to the people long ago."

"Lenny Bruce's legacy is freedom of speech and telling it as it is, getting your life and putting it out on the table, telling everyone about it."

"If I get busted in New York, the freest city in the world, that will be the end of my career."

"I was arrested for using a ten-letter word that began with ‘c,’ and I would marry no woman who was not one."

"If something about the human body disgusts you, the fault lies with the manufacturer."

"A Jew, in the dictionary, is one who is descended from the ancient tribes of Judea, or one who is regarded as a descendant from that tribe. That's what it says in the dictionary, but you and I know what a Jew is: One Who Killed Our Lord... there should be a statute of limitations for that crime."

"Are there any niggers here tonight? Could you turn on the house lights, please, and could the waiters and waitresses just stop serving, just for a second? And turn off this spot. Now what did he say? "Are there any niggers here tonight?" I know there's one nigger, because I see him back there working. Let's see, there's two niggers. And between those two niggers sits a kike. And there's another kike— that's two kikes and three niggers. And there's a spic. Right? Hmm? There's another spic. Ooh, there's a wop; there's a polack; and, oh, a couple of greaseballs. And there's three lace-curtain Irish micks. And there's one, hip, thick, hunky, funky, boogie. Boogie boogie. Mm-hmm. I got three kikes here, do I hear five kikes? I got five kikes, do I hear six spics, I got six spics, do I hear seven niggers? I got seven niggers. Sold American. I pass with seven niggers, six spics, five micks, four kikes, three guineas, and one wop. Well, I was just trying to make a point, and that is that it's the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness. Dig: if President Kennedy would just go on television, and say, "I would like to introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet," and if he'd just say "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" to every nigger he saw, "boogie boogie boogie boogie boogie," "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" 'til nigger didn't mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school."

"The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds."

"That's what happened to Lenny Bruce. He got angry, and then he wasn't funny any more."

"I want to perform an unnatural act."

"You can't put tits and ass on the marquee!...Why not?...Because it's dirty and vulgar, that's why not!... Titties are dirty and vulgar?...Okay, we'll compromise. How about Latin? Gluteus maximus, pectoralis majors nightly...That's alright, that's clean, class with ass, I'll buy it...Clean to you, schmuck, but dirty to the Latins!"

"The liberals can understand everything but people who don't understand them."

"I'll die young, but it's like kissing God."

"One [martini] is all right, two is too many, three is not enough."

"My opposition lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language."

"I’m 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I’d only be 48. That’s the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40."

"The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic."