How to Talk Dirty and Influence People: An Autobiography

by Lenny Bruce

whatever releases people and brings them together is good, and whatever confines and separates them is bad.

Lonesome people are a vast neglected segment of that mythical American Public the advertising men are always talking about. One mustn’t assume that all lonesome people are pensioners, old maids and physically handicapped shut-ins. There are lonesome young men who sit in the Greyhound Bus Station and there are secretaries who live in immaculate apartments

Our society is based on competition.

Everybody wants love and acceptance and he soon learns that one way to get it is by getting higher marks than the other fellow.

You spend your whole life thinking and worrying.

“At least I’m something,” is the keynote. “I belong to a group. I share their notoriety, their problems, their laughter.” In a crowded arena, the cliché “It takes one to know one” is actually a profound philosophy.

People are the same the world over.

The word “immoral” is entirely subjective and not specific.

One cannot cast the first stone—if already stoned.

A crutch is a crutch no matter if it is made of wood or aluminum.

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

“God made my body and if it is dirty, then the imperfection lies with the Manufacturer, not the product.

A uniform is an important means to instant acceptance. A man is no longer just a man; he is part of an institution—milkman, postman, diaper man—he has conquered the suspicion of being a stranger by acquiring a kind of official anonymity. He is associated with a definite mission.

Why don’t religious institutions use their influence to relieve human suffering instead of sponsoring such things as the Legion of Decency,

Why doesn’t the Legion of Decency say: “It’s indecent that men should stand by and watch cyanide gas administered to human lungs in a death chamber!” The answer is because in their philosophy life is not as important as death. If death and the imminence of death serves the purpose of bringing a person to his knees before the Church, then it is worth using as a positive instrument of propagating the faith. The Church therefore condones capital punishment.

No man is to be forced to believe in something that goes against the grain of his conscience.

We all sell out some part of us.

The motivation of the interviewer is not to get a terse, accurate answer, but rather to write an interesting, slanted article within the boundaries of the editorial outlook of his particular publication, so that he will be given the wherewithal to make the payment on his MG.

Well, in a very real sense it’s semantics—the search for the ultimate truth that lies beneath the social hypocrisy in which we live.

you must, to be a real and whole person, you must see all of life and see it in a balanced, honest way.

I’m not profound, this is something that I assume someone must have laid on me, because I do not have an original thought. I am screwed—I speak English—that’s it. I was not born in a vacuum. Every thought I have belongs to somebody else. Then I must just take—ding-ding-ding—somewhere.

Obscenity is a human manifestation.

Nobody can offend you by telling you a dirty toilet story. They can offend you because it’s trite; you have heard it many, many times.

The truth is “what is.” If “what is” is, you have to sleep eight, ten hours a day, that is the truth. A he will be: People need no sleep at all. Truth is “what is.”

There’s never a lie because there is never a truth.

you’re of no use, because that’s the purpose of life, to re-create it.

“If you haven’t got your health, money isn’t worth anything.” Oh, yeah? If you’re deathly ill, money means a hell of a lot. Especially to the doctor.

Do you people think yourselves better because you burned your enemies at long distance with missiles without ever seeing what you had done to them?

adults don’t need, or shouldn’t have, anyone to protect them from hearing truth in whatever form it appears no matter how noble the motive for suppression

INTERVIEWER: I know you must really hate someone or something to have your point of view on humor. LENNY: Actually, when you hate someone or something, it makes you a little uncomfortable to see it or hear it.

people are only interested in what they can get out of a person.

that the listener hears only what he wants to hear.

The dust would gather on all the people who hold that superior moral position of serving humanity, for they will have become aware that their very existence, creative ability and symbolic status had depended wholly upon intellectual dishonesty.

For there is no anonymous giver, except perhaps the guy who knocks up your daughter.

There is only what is. The what-should-be never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is only what is.

I am influenced by every second of my waking hour.