Tom Lehrer Quotes

Playboy has a long history of high-quality interviews along with the objectification of women, and so I think she does have a point there. I don't think that the words are necessarily nullified. It's just that that context is something you ought to be suspicious of.

I am much more understanding of people than I used to be when I was young - people were either villainous or wonderful. They were painted in very bright colours. The bad side of it - and there is a corollary to everything - is that when we get older, we fuss more. I used to despise people who fussed.

We grow up to respect the gray. Black or white, one or the other, is childish. It represents the worldview of someone who does not know the world.

I think people will have great conversations about religions, women's sexuality, gender issues and gay issues.

I'm glad that we have a history at all and that we can talk about feminist history. But I do think that it doesn't really pay attention to the complexity and the nuance that is feminist thought.

I do believe that it's something that we don't talk about, but when there are clearly defined gender roles, it is much simpler. Because you don't have to think, which people apparently don't like to do.

There's no good guys and bad guys.

To be a fashion critic is easy because you just say, 'I love it, I hate it,' but life is more than love and hate.

There are two words for everything.

'The Truth About Lorin Jones' will undoubtedly shock and offend as many readers as it will amuse, since it dares to make fun of feminism - of its manners, if not its politics.

Pornography is the undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda.

Women are so complicated, it's unbelievable.

You know, there's an economy in lyric-writing that doesn't afford you, or at least me - I usually start off with nine or 10 verses and then boil it down to two or three that are half the length of the original verses. I think for me it's about what you leave out [rather] than what you put in. I'm not sure that the songs help me figure anything out so much as they're a distillation of the original question.

I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library-everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.

I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.

If I were to die tomorrow, I think they'd say Newman 56, composer of the hit song, Short People. Jumped off a mountain today.

...everything looks worse in black and white.

[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits.

In a perfect world everything would be either black or white, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn't a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is.

I'm trying to get away from trashing women, to be honest. I think I've done enough of that in my career.

People do things in the names of good, and in the name of ideals, but the world isn't that simple. So they end up doing things that aren't necessarily good. Even if they think they're doing the right thing, but when viewed from a different perspective they can look barbaric and crazy.

I have discovered with advancing years that few things are entirely black or white, but more often different shades of grey.

When a guy writes a scene where a woman does a deviant sex act on camera, it's objectifying. But when a woman writes it, it's feminism.

Everything is simpler than you think and at the same time more complex than you imagine

Everything seems simpler from a distance.