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Lenny Bruce

Lenny Bruce Quotes

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Famous Lenny Bruce Quotes

“[Excerpt of an article by Arthur Gelb in The New York Times, read at trial] Although he seems at times to be doing his utmost to antagonize his audience, Mr. Bruce displays such a patent air of morality beneath the brashness that his lapses in taste are often forgivable... At times Mr. Bruce's act, devoid of the running series of staccato jokes that are traditional to the night-club comic, seems like a salvationist lecture; it is biting, sardonic, certainly stimulating and quite often funny- but never in a jovial way. His mocking diatribe rarely elicits a comfortable belly laugh. It requires concentration. But there is much in it to wring a rueful smile and appreciative chuckle. There is even more to evoke a fighting gleam in the eye. There are also spells of total confusion.”

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Book:How to Talk Dirty and Influence People
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“The truth is 'what is.' If 'what is' is, you have to sleep eight, ten hours a day, that is the truth. A lie will be: People need no sleep at all. Truth is 'what is.' If every politician from the beginning is crooked, there is no crooked. But if you are concerned with a lie, 'what should be'-and 'what should be' is a fantasy, a terrible, terrible lie that someone gave the people long ago: This is what should be-and no one ever saw what should be, that you don't need any sleep and you can go seven years without sleep, so that all the people were made to measure up to that dirty lie. You know there's no crooked politicians. There's never a lie because there is never a truth.”

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Book:How to Talk Dirty and Influence People
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“Now, if anyone in this room or the world finds those two words decadent, obscene, immoral, amoral, asexual, the words 'to come' really make you feel uncomfortable, if you think I'm rank for saying it to you, you the beholder think it's rank for listening to it, you probably can't come. And then you're of no use, because that's the purpose of life, to re-create it.”

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Book:How to Talk Dirty and Influence People
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