I was a class clown. At 12, I was definitely clowning. I was making all the jokes. But I was smart, so the teachers didn’t know what to do with me.

Common Core is a big win for education.

I do all my own stunts. I’m kidding.

Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.

It’s very interesting, the joke comes first and then the wording comes within five seconds, maybe ten seconds. My thing is to get the joke across in as few words as possible. However, sometimes a word that’s not really needed does help the rhythm of it. It’s a gut feeling.

I love making people laugh. And I love laughing.

Never have we stolen the intelligences of other peoples. On the contrary, in Cuba we have trained tens of thousands of doctors and other top-level professionals, for free, in order to send them back to their own countries.

Whenever I want to laugh, I read a wonderful book, ‚Children’s Letters to God.‘ You can open it anywhere. One I read recently said, ‚Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy.‘

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, ‚Did you sleep good?‘ I said ‚No, I made a few mistakes.‘

Alimony is like buying hay for a dead horse.

I don’t think comedy will ever die.

It’s not going to do any good to land on Mars if we’re stupid.

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

I think I’m pretty smart. I think I’m pretty clever. But there’s a lot that you hone in on when you finish your education.

People make jokes about my bosoms, why don’t they look underneath the breasts at the heart? It’s obvious I’ve got big ones and if people want to assume they’re not mine, then let them.

One of the very important characteristics of a student is to question. Let the students ask questions.

Everything has its limit – iron ore cannot be educated into gold.

There was a time when people said, ‚Jim, if you keep on making faces, your face will freeze like that.‘ Now they just say, ‚Pay him!‘

There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

The Sisters of Notre Dame at St. Aloysius Grade School influenced my life tremendously. This was due to the fact that they encouraged you always to make sure that God is the focus of your life, and they didn’t allow you to do anything except to the very best of your ability.

It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.

Don’t be getting sloppy drunk and telling them dirty jokes.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady and the other was to be independent, and the law was something most unusual for those times because for most girls growing up in the ’40s, the most important degree was not your B.A. but your M.R.S.

I had nearly finished school because I was making effort not that bad on that. But there was a law in Germany after the war. You could not make your final examination before 18, so lots of people who were late because of the way had to do it first.

My neighbor has a circular driveway… he can’t get out.

When I was at school, I used to stay on a balcony singing and people would stand around listening.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.

The French complain of everything, and always.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

I’m spending a year dead for tax reasons.

Now they show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you’ve got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem. Maybe you should get rid of the body before you do the wash.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

I’m a meathead, man. You’ve got smart people, and you’ve got dumb people. I just happen to be dumb.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

It’s all to do with the training: you can do a lot if you’re properly trained.

Most of the stuff I do on the show comes out of me just trying to make my friends laugh.

The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it’s so much fun.

I always believe that there should come a time when your energy, speed, stamina should combine well with your brains.

I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.

Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another.

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

What destroys more self-confidence than any other educational thing in America is being assigned to some remedial math when you get into some college, and then it’s not taught very well and you end up with this sense of, ‚Hey, I can’t really figure those things out.‘

I had some eyeglasses. I was walking down the street when suddenly the prescription ran out.

No man goes before his time – unless the boss leaves early.

Modern cynics and skeptics… see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.

I met Woz when I was 13, at a friend’s garage. He was about 18. He was, like, the first person I met who knew more electronics than I did at that point. We became good friends, because we shared an interest in computers and we had a sense of humor. We pulled all kinds of pranks together.

We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they’ll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year.

I like school and I like learning.

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.

The best teacher is very interactive.

Man is the only animal capable of reasoning, though many others possess the faculty of memory and instruction in common with him.