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“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.”
“A good wife always forgives her husband when she’s wrong.”
“You can lead a man to Congress, but you can’t make him think.”
“We owe a lot to Thomas Edison – if it wasn’t for him, we’d be watching television by candlelight.”
“My doctor told me that jogging could add years to my life. I think he was right. I feel ten years older already.”
“Money can’t buy you happiness, but it helps you look for it in a lot more places.”
“I’d rather be a could-be if I cannot be an are; because a could-be is a maybe who is reaching for a star. I’d rather be a has-been than a might-have-been, by far; for a might have-been has never been, but a has was once an are.”
“Laughter is an instant vacation.”
“A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours.”
“If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?”
“Poverty is not a disgrace, but it’s terribly inconvenient.”
“Now a ‘funnyman’ can get a laugh before opening his mouth – looking funny. Lou Costello was one of your great funnymen. Harry Langdon, Larry Semon; they were all funnymen – they looked funny. W.C. Fields was never a comedian. Slim Summerville was a comedian, yet looked funny. Now if you have both attributes, you are in good shape.”
“I live to laugh, and I laugh to live.”
“They’ve finally comes up with the perfect office computer. If it makes a mistake, it blames another computer.”
“Experience is what you have after you’ve forgotten her name.”
“The company accountant is shy and retiring. He’s shy a quarter of a million dollars. That’s why he’s retiring.”
“I feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor’s sixth husband. I know what I’m supposed to do, but I don’t know how to make it interesting.”
“Anytime a person goes into a delicatessen and orders a pastrami on white bread, somewhere a Jew dies.”
“Like every comedian, if I heard a joke that I thought would work, I used it.”
“It’s amazing how fast later comes when you buy now.”
“There’s a difference between being a comic and a comedian. A comic is a guy who says funny things, and a comedian is a guy who says things funny, and he has a style and point of view that will last much longer.”
“I just filled out my income tax forms. Who says you can’t get killed by a blank?”
“People say I owe a lot to television. The fact is I was a star long before television. What TV made me is unemployed.”
“I received a lot of complaints from parents who wrote and told me that their kids wouldn’t go to sleep until our show was over. So I went on the air and told all the children watching to ‘listen to their Uncle Miltie and go to bed right after the show.’”
“I have a file of four million jokes… I have them cross-indexed. Whatever subject you want, I have a joke on it.”