Fred Allen Quotes

Televisio is a vehicle that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.

The world is a grindstone and life is your nose

Radio is a bag of mediocrity where little men with carbon minds wallow in sluice of their own making.

He's so small, he's a waste of skin.

Ed Sullivan will be around as long as someone else has talent.

Vaudeville could not vouch for the honesty, the integrity, or the mentality of the individuals who collectively made up the horde the medium embraced. All the human race demands of its members is that they be born. That is all vaudeville demanded. You just had to be born. You could be ignorant and be a star. You could be a moron and be wealthy. The elements that went to make up vaudeville were combed from the jungles, the four corners of the world, the intelligentsia and the subnormal.

I always have trouble remembering three things: faces, names, and - I can't remember what the third thing is.

The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.

I was just working in the shop and all of a sudden something just triggered in me and I started shaking. And then I walked back into the house and my wife asked, 'What's the matter?' and I said 'I don't feel good.' And tears - uncontrollable tears - was coming out of my eyes. And she said, 'What's the matter?' And I said 'I just thought about that execution I did two days ago, and everybody else's that I was involved with.' And what it was something triggered within and it just - everybody - all of these executions all of a sudden sprung forward.

If children could vote, Jesse Jackson would be our next president.

Father Time is the make-up man responsible for the physical changes that determine the parts the average actor is to play.

She used to be a teacher but she has no class now.

What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement.

The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference.

I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.

A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to be well-known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.

Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

Success is like dealing with your kid or teaching your wife to drive. Sooner or later you'll end up in the police station.

My hometown was so dull that one time the tide went out and never came back.

The average vice-president is a form of executive fungus that attaches itself to a desk. On a boat this growth would be called a barnacle.

I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.

If I could get my membership fee back, I'd resign from the human race.

You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.

Hollywood is a great place if you're an orange.

A group of people who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done

The advertising world had space men in it before spacemen existed.

My uncle is a Southern planter. He's an undertaker in Alabama.

He has no idea what it was like to grow up in the South, where you had to hold your head down.

Three million frogs' legs are served in Paris - daily. Nobody knows what became of the rest of the frogs.

An income tax form is like a laundry list - either way you lose your shirt.

It was once rumored that fledgling executives walked around their offices backwards so they wouldn't have to face an issue.

On ships they call them barnacles; in business they attach themselves to desks and are called vice presidents.

Condensed milk is wonderful. I don't see how they can get a cow to sit down on those little cans.

I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case, and got my tuition back.

A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.

In show business, more showgirls are kept than promises.

Everywhere outside New York City is Bridgeport, Connecticut.

I play a musical instrument a little, but only for my own amazement.

A psychiatrists is the next man you start talking to after you start talking to yourself.

With the advance of refrigeration, I hope that along with the frozen foods someday we will have frozen conversation. A person will be able to keep a frozen promise indefinitely.

He was so narrow minded that if he fell on a pin it would blind him in both eyes.

The S.S. Sierra was a ten-thousand-ton vessel. Today, lifeboats bigger than the Sierra are found on the Queen Mary and other luxury liners.

He writes so well he makes me feel like putting my quill back in my goose.

If criticism had any power to harm, the skunk would be extinct by now.

Most of us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats; then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.

Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission.

My agent gets 10 percent of everything I get, except the blinding headaches.

Radio is called a medium because it is rare that anything is well done.

Cocktail party: A gathering held to enable forty people to talk about themselves at the same time. The man who remains after the liquor is gone is the host.

The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.

Television is the triumph of machine over people.

I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.

Everything is for the eye these days - TV, Life, Look, the movies. Nothing is just for the mind. The next generation will have eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all.

California is a great place to live if you're an orange.

A committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing, but who, as a group, can meet and decide that nothing can be done.

A telescope will magnify a star a thousand times, but a good press agent can do even better.

I'm going to Boston to see my doctor. He's a very sick man.

You only live once. But if you work it right, once is enough.

Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.

A comedian who starts talking to himself becomes his own audience. This is fatal.

There are two kinds of jokes - funny jokes and Jack Benny jokes.

If the grass is greener in the other fellow's yard- let him worry about cutting it.

To a newspaperman, a human being is an item with skin wrapped around it.

When Jack Benny plays the violin, it sounds as though the strings are still in the cat.

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.

Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in a gnat's navel with room left over for two caraway seeds and an agent's heart.

All I know about humour is that I don't know anything about it.

The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.

A gentleman is any man who wouldn't hit a woman with his hat on.