Lenny Bruce Quotes

There are never enough 'I love you's.

If you can't say "Fuck" you can't say, "Fuck the government.

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.

If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.

The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is.

The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it...try to fake three laughs in an hour -- ha ha ha ha ha -- they'll take you away, man. You can't.

Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.

Liberals can understand everything but people who don't understand them.

I am influenced by every second of my waking hour.

If you live in New York, even if you're Catholic, you're Jewish

There is only what is and that's it. What should be is a dirty lie.

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

I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like "What I'm Going to be If I Grow Up

The thing is, all my heroes were junkies. Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Miles Davis, Hubert Selby, Jr... These guys were cool. They were committed. They would not have been caught dead doing an ALF episode.

Everyone runs around trying to find a place where they still serve breakfast because eating breakfast, even if it's 5 o'clock in the afternoon, is a sign that the day has just begun and good things can still happen. Having lunch is like throwing in the towel.

Even if you are Catholic, if you live in New York you're Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you are going to be goyish even if you are Jewish.

Lenny Bruce described flamenco as being an art form wherein a dancer applauds his own ass.

Communism is like one big phone company.

People are leaving the church and going back to God.

There is nothing sadder than an aging hipster.

Trying to imagine E. M. Forster, who found Ulysses indecorous, at a London performance of Lenny Bruce—to which in fact he was once taken. Trying to imagine the same for a time-transported Nathaniel Hawthorne—who during his first visit to Europe was even shocked by the profusion of naked statues.

You are a white. The Imperial Wizard. Now, if you don't think this is logic you can burn me on the fiery cross. This is the logic: You have the choice of spending fifteen years married to a woman, a black woman or a white woman. Fifteen years kissing and hugging and sleeping real close on hot nights. With a black, black woman or a white, white woman. The white woman is Kate Smith. And the black woman is Lena Horne. So you're not concerned with black or white anymore, are you? You are concerned with how cute or how pretty. Then let's really get basic and persecute ugly people!

must be lonesome, being bright and witty and aware,

Life is a four-letter word.

إذا كنت تؤمن أنّ هناك من إله، إلهٍ صنع لك جسدك، ولكنّك لازلت تحسب أنّك تستطيع عمل أيّ شيءٍ قذرٍ بذلك الجسد، العيب يقع إذاً في المصنِّع

I don’t want a sharp chick who quotes Kerouac; I just want to hear my old lady say, “Get up and fix the toilet, it’s still making noise.

…Catholicism is like Howard Johnson, and what they have are these franchises and they give all these people different franchises in the different countries but they have one government, and when you buy the Howard Johnson franchise you can apply it to the geography - whatever's cool for that area - and then you, you know, pay the bread to the main office.

I was forty-five years old and tired of being an artist. Besides, I owed $20,000 to relatives, finance companies, banks and assorted bookmakers and shylocks. It was really time to grow up and sell out as Lenny Bruce once advised. So I told my editors 'OK, I'll write a book about the mafia, just give me some money to get started'.

he rubbed his feet back and forth on the library carpet and when she walked by, he touched her with the tip of his index finger

(On his addiction to opiods): I'll die young, but it's like kissing God.

I don't smoke pot, and I'm glad because then I can champion it without special pleading. The reason I don't smoke it is because it facilitates ideas and heightens sensations-and I've got enough shit flying through my head without smoking pot.

I was not born in a vacuum. Every thought I have belongs to someone else.

There is only what is.

Billy Wilder, Lenny Bruce, Saul

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls - Lenny Bruce

Lenny Bruce joked that Chicago was the only city where death certificates listed a cause of death as “He wouldn’t listen.

They are open to learning from all religions, but reluctant to commit to any. Often they reject religion for one simple reason: They have had firsthand experience with it. Many have been part of an organized religion in the past, and the experience seemed more burdensome and boring than freeing and enlivening. They resonate with Lenny Bruce, who said, "People are leaving the church and finding God.

The first great break-through—or, rather, breakdown—of society’s nudity/lewdity guilt-by-association was the now-famous Marilyn Monroe calendar. Marilyn’s respectability when she died was based principally upon her economic status, which is, in the final analysis, the only type our society really respects.

When the crowd is with you, the jokes are fresh, your timing is just right, and the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars. You are exactly where you should be, and there is nothing better. Comedy is a rare gift from the gods, an awesome invention. It propels you right into the heart of the universe. No wonder all the great comedians had such destructive private lives. Lenny Bruce had to shoot up, Richard Pryor had to freebase. Sam Kinison was just as abusive towards himself as he was to the crowd. After you get the audience into that kind of frenzy, and you are being worshiped like the false idol you are, how do you leave the stage and transition back into real life? How can you just come down? How can you ease back into mortality? What will you do for an encore? What is there left to do but set yourself on fire?

[Excerpt from Kenneth Brown testimony] Great comics throughout literature have always disguised by comedy, through laughter, through jokes, an underlying theme which is very serious, and perhaps needs laughter because it is also painful...

Mae Brussell began to study the pattern of Nazis coming to the United States after World War Two and patterns of murders identical to those in Nazi Germany. It was as if an early Lenny Bruce bit—on how a show-bit booking agency, MCA, chose Adolf Hitler as dictator—had actually been a satirical prophecy of the way Richard Nixon would rise to power. “How much violence was there in Nazi Germany,” Mae asks rhetorically, “before the old Germany, the center of theater, opera, philosophy, poetry, psychology and medicine, was destroyed? How many incidents took place that were not coincidental before it was called Fascism? What were the transitions? How many people? Was it when the first tailor disappeared? Or librarian? Or professor? Or when the first press was closed or the first song eliminated? Or when the first political science teacher was killed coming home on his bike? How many incidents happened there that were perfectly normal until people woke up and said, ‘Hey, we’re in a police state!

The truth is 'what is.' If 'what is' is, you have to sleep eight, ten hours a day, that is the truth. A lie will be: People need no sleep at all. Truth is 'what is.' If every politician from the beginning is crooked, there is no crooked. But if you are concerned with a lie, 'what should be'-and 'what should be' is a fantasy, a terrible, terrible lie that someone gave the people long ago: This is what should be-and no one ever saw what should be, that you don't need any sleep and you can go seven years without sleep, so that all the people were made to measure up to that dirty lie. You know there's no crooked politicians. There's never a lie because there is never a truth.

Marijuana will be legal some day, because the many law students who now smoke pot will some day become Congressmen and legalize it in order to protect themselves. You wouldn't believe how many people smoke pot. If anyone reading this would like to become mayor, believe me, there is a vast, untapped vote. Of course, you wouldn't want to be the Marijuana Mayor, so you'd have to make it a trick statute, like: 'The Crippled Catholic Jewish War Children in Memory of Ward Bond Who Died for Your Bill to Make Marijuana Legal.

Opioids can deliver you, if only for a few minutes, from physical or emotional pain, from discomfort, from anxiety, from need. It is like no other human experience. “I’ll die young,” the comedian Lenny Bruce once said of his own addiction. “But it’s like kissing God.” (He did die young, naked on his bathroom floor, from a morphine overdose, at forty.)

If you could jerk off to something else, like a hamburger, could you imagine the delight in being alive?

It's the supression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness.

With overpopulation, human misery, and the threat of war increasing, we need rather more adult performances from society.

Late in November, Lenny took off for his eagerly anticipated job in Chicago. It had been nearly a year since he played the chilly city, and those who hadn't seen him for that period, or even longer, were shocked at the change in his appearance. The once handsome, animated, brilliant performer and commentator was now a fat, bent, shabby-looking street loafer, a horribly dissipated, baggy-eyed, numb-fleshed junkie, with a tragic darkness in his eyes.

Everybody was pissed off in those days, but there were no socially acceptable outlets for hostility. "Hostile" was a word you heard constantly -- but it was a scolding word, like 'bad,' 'naughty,' or 'no-no.' All over this heavily psychoanalyzed country, people were saying to other people, 'Why are you being so hostile? . . . That's a hostile remark! . . . There's a lot of hostility behind something like that!' It was an incredible age, the fifties! An age of stifled violence obsessing about THE BOMB!

What is it about legs? Or what is it about breasts? Or the small of the back? What is it about anything? One day there will be no difference between anything. It'll all be the exact same thing. One day you'll look in the dictionary and there will be only one word and you'll just have to make do.

I had heard that Presley died on the toilet, but I’d assumed the location was happenstance, as it was with Judy Garland and Lenny Bruce: an embarrassing setting for a standard celebrity overdose. But the straining-at-stool theory made some sense. With all three autopsies—that of J.W., Mr. K., and E., as Presley’s intimates called him—the collapse was abrupt and the autopsy revealed no obvious cause of death. (Though Presley had traces of several prescription drugs in his blood, none was present at a lethal level.) What Elvis’s autopsy did unambiguously reveal was a colon two to three times normal size.

Reggie made him feel like he was nine years old and out for dinner with his family at the Ponderosa Steak House and he had run into his French teacher and his mother invited her to dine with him. Reggie made him feel like he was sitting in a public bathroom stall and someone had come into the bathroom and began singing a song about what a stinky bastard he was while he was in there sweating it out. Reggie made him feel like someone had taken the red Tonka fire engine he had always wanted and painfully corkscrewed it down the front of his jeans. Reggie made him feel like the ice cream man had just rolled by and all his dead grandparents were mooning him out the truck window.

Now, if anyone in this room or the world finds those two words decadent, obscene, immoral, amoral, asexual, the words 'to come' really make you feel uncomfortable, if you think I'm rank for saying it to you, you the beholder think it's rank for listening to it, you probably can't come. And then you're of no use, because that's the purpose of life, to re-create it.

Sahl was never a great comic. His nervous, jabbing, keep-them-off-balance delivery was the strategy of a man who was not comfortable in front of an audience. His creative method -- a rapid scanning of the day's output of newspapers, magazines, and radio broadcasts -- was a recipe for superficiality or, at best, the kind of quick, shallow laugh triggered by a topical allusion. Sahl was always devoid of the two basic ingredients of great humor: imagination and soul. He could make fun of the latest Hollywood movies. He could stab at the pieties of his own class. He could take an abrupt insight into politics or wold events and phrase it neatly into a gag. What he could never do was suggest a world of living, breathing people behaving in ridiculous yet recognizably human patterns.

[Excerpt from Kenneth Brown testimony] These works use often repulsive techniques and vocabulary to make-to insist-that people will look at the whole of things and not just one side. These artists wish not to divide the world in half and say one is good and one is bad and avoid the bad and accept the good, but you must, to be a real and whole person, you must see all of life, and see it in a balanced, honest way. I would include Mr. Bruce, certainly, in his intent, and he has success in doing this, as did Rabelais and Swift.

A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of “monopoly on the means of production.” Since man extends his nervous system through channels of communications like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every individual’s brain. Thus, in pre-literate societies taboos on the spoken word are more numerous and more Draconic than at any more complex level of social organization. With the invention of written speech — hieroglyphic, ideographic, or alphabetical — the taboos are shifted to this medium; there is less concern with what people say and more concern with what they write. (Some of the first societies to achieve literacy, such as Egypt and the Mayan culture of ancient Mexico, evidently kept a knowledge of their hieroglyphs a religious secret which only the higher orders of the priestly and royal families were allowed to share.) The same process repeats endlessly: Each step forward in the technology of communication is more heavily tabooed than the earlier steps. Thus, in America today (post-Lenny Bruce), one seldom hears of convictions for spoken blasphemy or obscenity; prosecution of books still continues, but higher courts increasingly interpret the laws in a liberal fashion, and most writers feel fairly confident that they can publish virtually anything; movies are growing almost as desacralized as books, although the fight is still heated in this area; television, the newest medium, remains encased in neolithic taboo. (When the TV pundits committed lèse majesté after an address by the then Dominant Male, a certain Richard Nixon, one of his lieutenants quickly informed them they had overstepped, and the whole tribe — except for the dissident minority — cheered for the reassertion of tradition.) When a more efficient medium arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.

I’m not sure I’m going to like Don Mincher. I keep hearing that big southern accent of his. It’s prejudice, I know, but every time I hear a southern accent I think: stupid. A picture of George Wallace pops into my mind. It’s like Lenny Bruce saying he could never associate a nuclear scientist with a southern accent.

I am not offended by war in the same way that I am not offended by rain. Both are “motivated” by need. I was at Anzio. I lived in a continual state of ambivalence: guilty but glad. Glad I wasn’t the GI enjoying that final “no-wake-up-call” sleep on his blood-padded mud mattress. It would be interesting to hear his comment if we could grab a handful of his hair, drag his head out of the dirt and ask his opinion on the questions that are posed every decade, the contemporary shouts of: “How long are we going to put up with Cuba’s nonsense?” “Just how many insults can we take from Russia?” I was at Salerno. I can take a lot of insults.

Chapter 8 “America’s No. 1 Vomic” (Winchell)

Chapter 9

Lenny Bruce and Honey Harlow made love, partied, and hung out in the calm blue waves; Caught the sun between them, and its all-consuming power fused their twisted souls together like a live wire. The guardrail separating their psyche annihilated in ecstatic firestorms of lust as the racecars of their consci shot through the tunnels of each others’ pupils simultaneously when they came. This was the early days of their wild life together. Before the car crash that cracked her pelvis in Pittsburgh, and almost killed her at the apex of her vixen stripper body’s sexual peak of prowess. Bruce and Honey were in love. They should’ve never left Miami Beach.

They made love, partied, and hung out in the calm blue waves; Caught the sun between them, and its all-consuming power fused their twisted souls together like a live wire. The guardrail separating their psyche annihilated in ecstatic firestorms of lust as the racecars of their consci shot through the tunnels of each others’ pupils simultaneously when they came. This was the early days of their wild life together. Before the car crash that cracked her pelvis in Pittsburgh, and almost killed her at the apex of her vixen stripper body’s sexual peak of prowess. Bruce and Honey were in love. They should’ve never left Miami Beach.

It’s not that the Davenports had never had black people around their house before, or even a Chinese guy once, but never a Malaysian who looked Chinese to some and Indian to others, fancied himself black at times, and wanted to be the next Lenny Bruce Lee; a preppy black football player who sounded like the president and read Plato in Latin; and a white woman who occasionally claimed to be Native American. They were like an overconstructed novel, each representative of some cul-de-sac of idiolect and stereotype, missing only a handicapped person—No! At Berkeley we say handi-capable person—and a Jew and a Hispanic, and an Asian not of the subcontinent, Louis always said.

Yadda yadda yadda, as Lenny Bruce would say.

BRIAN JONES: July 1969, London. One of the original members of the Rolling Stones. Unique musician, under control of drugs by 1966, took LSD that caused personality changes and depression. Seemed to have brain damage and disintegrated. Compare his arrests and planted grass to the treatment Lenny Bruce received, forced to drop from the group. Keith Richards said, Some very weird things happened the night Brian died. We had these chauffeurs working for us, and we tried to find out. Some of them had a weird hold over Brian. I got straight into it and wanted to know who was there and couldn’t find out. The only cat I could ask was the one I think who got rid of everybody, and did a whole disappearing thing so that when the cops arrived, it was just an accident. Maybe it was. I don’t know. I don’t even know who was there that night, and finding out is impossible. It’s the same feeling with who killed Kennedy. You can’t get to the bottom of it. – Tony Scaduto, Mick Jagger

El capitalismo es lo mejor. Es la libre empresa. Intercambio. En Gimbels[1], si un día me pongo borde con el dependiente, «pues a mí esto no me gusta», ¿qué puedo hacer? Si realmente no quiere razonar, le digo: «Que te jodan, tío, me largo». ¿Qué puede hacer ese tipo de Gimbels, aunque fuera el presidente de Gimbels? Siempre puede echarme de la tienda, pero yo podría ir a Macy’s. No puede hacerme daño. El comunismo es como una gran compañía telefónica. Control del gobierno, tío. Y si me harto de esa compañía telefónica, ¿a cuál me voy? Acabaría como un idiota con un vaso de plástico atado al extremo de un hilo. LENNY BRUCE

Si te crees que hay un Dios, un Dios que hizo tu cuerpo y aun así piensas que puedes hacer algo sucio con ese cuerpo, entonces el problema es del fabricante. LENNY BRUCE

War spells out my philosophy of “No right or wrong”— just “Your right, my wrong”—everything is subjective.

Chapter 7 The Sickest of the Sick

at the core of whatever made this human atom pile smolder he wasn't cooking anymore. He was all bottled

Baudelaire, William Blake, D. H. Lawrence, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Ken Kesey, the Beatles, and Hunter S. Thompson were as much the fathers of Saturday Night as Kovacs, Carson, Benny, and Berle. Dan Aykroyd called it Gonzo Television. They were video guerrillas, he’d say. Every show was an assault mission.

Dope broke the back of this already moribund

Chapter 6 Open Up Those Golden Gates

Lenny Bruce once claimed his infamous arrest for profanity was the result of having been heard using the word “schmuck” by a Yiddish-speaking undercover cop.

It struck me today that the people that have had an impact on me are the people who didn't make it. Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Lenny Bruce, Janis Joplin, John Belushi. It's not Making It to be Marilyn Monroe, but it is to me. In our culture these people are heroes. There's something inside of that- a message that killing yourself like that isn't so bad. All the interesting people do it, the extraordinary ones. A weird, weird message. Most of the people I've admired in show business-comedians, writers, actors-are alcoholics or drug addicts or suicides. It's bizarre. And I get to be in that club now. It's the one thing I cling to in here: Wow, I'm hip now, like the dead people. Romancing the stoned.

A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of “monopoly on the means of production.” Since man extends his nervous system through channels of communication like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every individual’s brain. Thus, in pre-literate societies taboos on the spoken word are more numerous and more Draconic than at any more complex level of social organization. With the invention of written speech—hieroglyphic, ideographic, or alphabetical —the taboos are shifted to this medium; there is less concern with what people say and more concern with what they write. (Some of the first societies to achieve literacy, such as Egypt and the Mayan culture of ancient Mexico, evidently kept a knowledge of their hieroglyphs a religious secret which only the higher orders of the priestly and royal families were allowed to share.) The same process repeats endlessly: Each step forward in the technology of communication is more heavily tabooed than the earlier steps. Thus, in America today (post-Lenny Bruce), one seldom hears of convictions for spoken blasphemy or obscenity; prosecution of books still continues, but higher courts increasingly interpret the laws in a liberal fashion, and most writers feel fairly confident that they can publish virtually anything; movies are growing almost as desacralized as books, although the fight is still heated in this area; television, the newest medium, remains encased in neolithic taboo. (When the TV pundits committed lèse majesté after an address by the then Dominant Male, a certain Richard Nixon, one of his lieutenants quickly informed them they had overstepped, and the whole tribe—except for the dissident minority—cheered for the reassertion of tradition.) When a more efficient medium arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.

I guess what happens is, if you get arrested in Town A (Philadelphia) and then Town B (San Francisco)-with a lot of publicity-then when you get to Town C they have to arrest you or what kind of shithouse town are they running? It's a pattern of unintentional harassment.

[Excerpt of an article by Arthur Gelb in The New York Times, read at trial] Although he seems at times to be doing his utmost to antagonize his audience, Mr. Bruce displays such a patent air of morality beneath the brashness that his lapses in taste are often forgivable... At times Mr. Bruce's act, devoid of the running series of staccato jokes that are traditional to the night-club comic, seems like a salvationist lecture; it is biting, sardonic, certainly stimulating and quite often funny- but never in a jovial way. His mocking diatribe rarely elicits a comfortable belly laugh. It requires concentration. But there is much in it to wring a rueful smile and appreciative chuckle. There is even more to evoke a fighting gleam in the eye. There are also spells of total confusion.

I want to help you if you have a dirty-word problem. There are none, and I'll spell it out logically to you. Here is a toilet. Specifically-that's all we're concerned with, specifics-if I can tell you a dirty toilet joke, we must have a dirty toilet. That's what we're all talking about, a toilet. If we take this toilet and boil it and it's clean, I can never tell you specifically a dirty toilet joke about this toilet. I can tell you a dirty toilet joke in the Milner Hotel, or something like that, but this toilet is a clean toilet now. Obscenity is a human manifestation. This toilet has no central nervous system, no level of consciousness. It is not aware; it is a dumb toilet; it cannot be obscene; it's impossible. If it could be obscene, it could be cranky, it could be a Communist toilet, a traitorous toilet. It can do none of these things. This is a dirty toilet here. Nobody can offend you by telling a dirty toilet story. They can offend you because it's trite; you've heard it many, many times.

Now, if the bedroom is dirty to you, then you are a true atheist, because if you have any of the mores, superstitions, if anyone in this audience believes that God made his body, and you body is dirty, the fault lies with the manufacturer. It's that cold, Jim, yeah.

By playing to what’s most politically correct, I worry we’ll never be challenged by the brilliant insights from the next generation’s George Carlin and Lenny Bruce, that we’ll lose what’s genuine and uncomfortable and forces us into introspection

The same process occurs, however, when people who prefer popular culture come into contact with high culture; they are frequently shocked by its espousal of “deviant” behavior, especially on the part of the artist, and they condemn it in terms similar to those in the mass culture critique. For example, during the 1960s, cultural and political satire was often called “sick comedy,” and Lenny Bruce was hounded off the stage and into suicide by the police and the courts. The defenders of high and popular culture attack each other in many ways. High culture condemns popular culture as vulgar and pathological, while popular culture attacks high culture for being overly intellectual, snobbish, and effeminate, inventing pejorative terms like “highbrow” and “egghead” for this purpose.

She was Bloomingdale’s, not Victoria Secret. She was vanilla, not peach. She was Paul Reiser, not Lenny Bruce. This was not my kind of chick.

The risks may be formidable, but the high is sublime. Opioids can deliver you, if only for a few minutes, from physical or emotional pain, from discomfort, from anxiety, from need. It is like no other human experience. "I'll die young," the comedian Lenny Bruce once said of his own addiction. "But it's like kissing God." (He did die young, naked on his bathroom floor, from a morphine overdose, at forty.)