Fred Allen's Quotes

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

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.

My father never raised his hand to any one of his children, except in self-defense.

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

Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.

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

An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer.

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

Committee - a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done.

During the Samuel Johnson days they had big men enjoying small talk; today we have small men enjoying big talk.

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

Her hat is a creation that will never go out of style; it will just look ridiculous year after year.

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

I don't want to own anything that won't fit into my coffin.

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

Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

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

Some movie stars wear their sunglasses even in church. They're afraid God might recognize them and ask for autographs.

Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.

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

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

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

It is probably not love that makes the world go around, but rather those mutually supportive alliances through which partners recognize their dependence on each other for the achievement of shared and private goals.

Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is to make a hole in one with you.

We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.