Lenny Bruce Quotes

“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”
― Lenny Bruce

“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.”
― David Markson, The Last Novel

“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.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

“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.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

“[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...”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

“I was not born in a vacuum. Every thought I have belongs to someone else.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

“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.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

“[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.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

“With overpopulation, human misery, and the threat of war increasing, we need rather more adult performances from society.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

“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.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

“[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.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

“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.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

“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.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

“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.”
― Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

“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.”
― Jacob Katel, Lenny, Flip, and Rickles: Standup Comics in The Magic City

“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.”
― Jacob Katel, Lenny, Flip, and Rickles: Standup Comics in The Magic City