George Carlin Quotes

I refuse to totally grow up. I've always been someone who says and does things that push politically correct boundaries.

I've always done 'the wrong thing' and had a pretty wonderful time doing it.

I always wanted to be different and do things differently. I was a pain in the neck. I was challenging everything you wanted me to do and challenging people in school.

Gypsy [Rose Lee] wasn't a linear person, and she didn't live life in a linear fashion. She was relentlessly self-inventing, and moved backward as often as she moved forward.

The thing is, I moved tons. I was in like nine schools by ninth grade, so I moved a ton of times when I was younger. As hard as that was growing up, it helped me in so many ways being an actress, because every year I was constantly changing who I was. I could be someone new. I wouldn't care if people judged me or didn't like me because, in the end, I knew I was probably going to move in a few months anyway.

I'd like to incite people to break the framework, to be disobedient in school, to stick their tongues out, to keep insulting authority.

A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school,preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not "studying a profession," for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.

There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure and moving on. Yet most people are stricken with fear. They fear failure so much that they fail. They are too conditioned, too used to being told what to do. It begins with the family, runs through school and goes into the business world.

I've been thrown out of schools and fired from jobs. I don't want to work. I can honestly say I haven't done an honest day's work in my life.

The first day I was told that I had osteoarthritis, I thought it was the worst thing that could possibly happen to me; I was done. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't run so my life was over. But because I'm a competitive person, I wasn't going to let anything slow me down and I turned it around and made it a positive.

From about the age of 5, I was aware that I didn't fit. I was the black, atheist kid in the all-white, Catholic school run by nuns. I was an anomaly.

There are always going to be people who run faster, jump higher, dive deeper, and come up drier.

The river itself portrays humanity precisely, with its tortuous windings, its accumulation of driftwood, its unsuspected depths, and its crystalline shallows, singing in the Summer sun. Barriers may be built across its path, but they bring only power, as the conquering of an obstacle is always sure to do. Sometimes when the rocks and stone-clad hills loom large ahead, and eternity itself would be needed to carve a passage, there is an easy way around. The discovery of it makes the river sing with gladness and turns the murmurous deeps to living water, bright with ripples and foam.

I don't follow the rules. That's kind of how I do everything.

Defiance, not obedience, is the American's answer to overbearing authority.

People should go where they are not supposed to go, say what they are not supposed to say, and stay when they are told to leave.

We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise, we harden.

The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.

Most of us become so rigidly fixed in the ruts carved out by genetic programming and social conditioning that we ignore the options of choosing any other course of action. Living exclusively by genetic and social instructions is fine as long as everything goes well. But the moment bioloical or social goals are frustrated- which in the long run is inevitable - a person must formulate new goals, and create a new flow activity for himself, or else he will always waste his energies in inner turmoil.

You owe it to yourself to find your own unorthodox way of succeeding, or sometimes, just surviving.

I learned that you can go after things before you are ready and so if you are going after it, you need to make sure that your spirit is ready. I learned also how to surrender to His will and not mine. Sometimes when you are going through something - and I am a guy who runs campaigns - I can make this happen. There has never been a campaign where I was picked to win.. I was always coming from behind.

I was the one small brunete among tall blondes. You only get one body, might as well love it. Nothing is the end of the world. Flash forward a year and ask, "Is this really going to be that big of a deal? In the long run, it's really not".

You can drag my body to school but my spirit refuses to go.

Not playing by the rules, not seeing things conventionally, that's the heart of who he [ Steve Jobs] is, and he does it in small ways of everyday rebellion just almost to assert who he is, like not putting a license plate on his car.

Fools follow rules when the set commands ya...