Steve Allen Quotations

Ours is a government of checks and balances. The Mafia and crooked businessmen make out checks, and the politicians and other compromised officials improve their bank balances.

Asthma doesn't seem to bother me any more unless I'm around cigars or dogs. The thing that would bother me most would be a dog smoking a cigar.

The hair is real - it's the head that's a fake.

In a rational society we would want our presidents to be teachers. In our actual society we insist they be cheerleaders.

If the Old Testament were a reliable guide in the matter of capital punishment, half the people in the United States would have to be killed tomorrow.

One of the nice things about problems is that a good many of them do not exist except in our imaginations.

If there is a God, the phrase that must disgust him is - holy war.

Humor is a social lubricant that helps us get over some of the bad spots.

I used to be a heavy gambler. But now I just make mental bets. That's how I lost my mind.

Dark energy is perhaps the biggest mystery in physics.

I don't know that much about them other than the fact that they gave us a lot of trouble last year over at their yard.

What we want is a healthy canopy. If we go in there and say, 'Just plant a bunch of trees,' they'll just plant them in a random fashion. That may result in a tree not surviving more than a decade.

He has a wonderful upside because of his size and his athletic ability. He's a basketball player. He's an athlete. He's just been a big part of our progress. He took on a leadership role.

He had to have been a lonely guy. He gave up his whole life for his career, ... When he was on the road all of the time, he didn't have any family or friends around, so that, for him, became vodka.

The purpose of having an open mind is the same as having an open mouth, the object being eventually to close it on something solid. But one should never close either mind or mouth until the general circumstances of the moment make it reasonable to do so.

My mother always said he was a very nice, endearing man, unlike his portrayals in the movies (as a child-hating, scheming, mean-spirited person), which I think was a product of him trying to get a laugh, ... Dad always described him as tremendously alert and ambitious. He had a hard shell, but underneath he had some softness.

SSME positions NC State as a worldwide leader in developing the skills that companies like IBM are looking for in their employees. Our students will now have a chance to be part of this emerging field, opening the door for them to pursue a wide variety of services-related jobs.

Just as with cars, it's critical to know the fuel efficiency of black holes. Without this information, we cannot figure out what is going on under the hood, so to speak, or what the engine can do.

It is going to be fearfully close. On Monday night the gap between Seven and Nine was just 8000 people.

I think (area residents) like the bragging rights of it,

Other than chauffeuring, (our duties are) helping them find places to eat and helping them find necessities, ... And we try to find some things for them that are entertaining and reflective of America, like the sites around Seattle.

I think it is hazy at the moment.

What this does is give us a step toward understanding why the galaxies in the universe look the way they do.

This year saw the best results ever. We are very happy and looking to get better results next year.

These black holes are very efficient, but it also takes a very long time to refuel them.

We think that will give the students a big edge over people that are just computer science or engineering.

We should be able to get more numbers out here to see this, because this is a big event.

Public housing units in New Orleans were huge,

Why do we do it, ... Because we?re crazy.

The universe really is accelerating. By using Chandra to study galaxy clusters, we have obtained strong new evidence for dark energy and clear and direct confirmation that the expansion of our universe is accelerating.

AFL ratings would be expected to go up, but they will only get the big increases if the Swans continue to draw an audience in Sydney.

This is an important step in understanding how such jets can be launched from magnetized disks of gas near the event horizon of a black hole. Just as with cars, it's critical to know the fuel efficiency of black holes.

In anyone's book, that would be pretty green.

I'm really happy with the play of Ian and Tommy. Tommy played really well in the cage for us today.

If you could make a car engine that was as efficient as one of these black hole engines you could get about a billion miles per gallon of gas. In anyone's book that would be pretty green.

OK, but I still need eight or 10 people to stay and work on the boat.

Once gas comes within a distance about a million times larger than the event horizon of the black hole, it becomes gravitationally captured. At this point the gas becomes fuel for the black hole engine.

It's our belief the 8 year old was isolated in a tent with him during part of that time.

They wanted to do some inexpensive shopping at Wal-Mart.

They are under pressure - and it shows.

It was a good win for us. We were also happy with the play of Peter Dorrance.

The hair is real; it's the head that's fake

The energy in these jets is absolutely huge, about a trillion trillion trillion watts.

It's the most complete team they've had since they had Xavier Lee and Kenny Scott.

Eddie has inherited a growing mess but people don't seem to be responding to the problems.

We expect that things are going to slow down, and that slowdown is going to be evident in two ways. One, we are going to see lower sales volume, fewer houses being sold. Secondly, we think the rate of price inflation will be declining fairly dramatically.

We want to follow Bruce on his path. Some of this could be disappointments; we're going to make it real.

I don't think there's any way Ten can lose it - they're too far in front.

Totalitarianism is patriotism institutionalized.

There are hundreds of millions who believe the Messiah has come. If he did, then it is unfortunately the case that his heroic sacrifice and death have had no effect whatsoever on the very problem his coming might have been expected to address, for history demonstrates, beyond question, that we Christians have been just as dangerous, singly and en masse, as non-Christians.

Thousands of years ago only Christ could walk on the water. Today anybody can do it; you just step on the garbage.

There is scarcely a page of the Bible on which an open mind does not perceive a contradiction, an unlikely story, an obvious error, an historical impossibility of one sort or another.

Radio is the theater of the mind; television is the theater of the mindless

Millions of Germans had absolute faith in Hitler. Millions of Russians had faith in Stalin. Millions of Chinese had faith in Mao. Billions have had faith in imaginary gods.

I cannot see how it can be argued that one should speak in tones of reverence and awe about the alleged divine instruction-in Psalms-to grab the defenseless bodies of innocent infants and dash their brains out against the nearest rocks or walls.

I'm all for sex. Seven nights a week. Days, too.

I do not understand those who take little or no interest in the subject of religion. If religion embodies a truth, it is certainly the most important truth of human existence. If it is largely error, then it is one of monumentally tragic proportions—and should be vigorously opposed.

Civilization itself . . . can easily be swept aside when mob passions are aroused.

Nothing is better than the unintended humor of reality.

Religious believers of the world, you are free to continue to debate the simple, narrow question that divides you from atheists, but you have no right, in so doing, to treat the Humanists of the world with contempt. You owe them a deep debt of gratitude, for not only have they shed much light on a naturally dark world but they have very probably helped civilize your own specific religion.

There is not the slightest question but that the God of the Old Testament is a jealous, vengeful God, inflicting not only on the sinful pagans but even on his Chosen People fire, lighting, hideous plagues and diseases, brimstone, and other curses.

Ideas have consequences, and totally erroneous ideas are likely to have destructive consequences.

God is by definition the holder of all possible knowledge, it would be impossible for him to have faith in anything. Faith, then, is built upon ignorance and hope.

This is The Tonight Show. I can't tell you too much about it, other than the fact that this program is going to go on forever.

There are few pages of history which do not demonstrate that public prayer and ritual never inoculated people against mass-madness and cruelty. What is needed is emphasis on morality and manners.

Consider the wave of revulsion that floods the average person when he or she hears of the practice of human sacrifice by the Aztecs and other so-called primitive peoples. How savage and barbaric such practices seem. But when a Christian or Jew comes across human sacrifice in the Bible (see Jephthah's immolation of his daughter in Judges 11:30-40), is he or she repulsed?

One social evil for which the New Testament is clearly in part responsible is anti-Semitism.

The Bible is unfortunately unclear on a long list of moral and social questions and sex is one of them. On the one hand, there are expressions of admiration for the reportedly virgin mother of Jesus, but other portions of scripture speak quite accommodatingly of polygamy.

The fundamentalist believer is mostly a weird intellectual who often lacks real faith altogether. As a self-appointed attorney for God, who is in no need of attorneys, he very easily turns out to be more godless than the agnostic and the unbeliever. At all events, he seems deaf to poetry.

...we are entitled to make almost any reasonable assumption, but should resist making conclusions until evidence requires that we do so.

Everybody is somewhere.

To those who wish to punish others -- or at least to see them punished, if the avengers are too cowardly to take matters in to their own hands -- the belief in a fiery, hideous hell appears to be a great source of comfort.

Laughter would appear to be a physical reflex, although even if it is, this still leaves unanswered the question of why the human response to humor is a convulsive spasm of the respiratory mechanism rather than a crossing of the eyes or a waving of the arms.

We must never forget that both good and evil flow from the Bible. It is therefore not above criticism.

Without laughter life on our planet would be intolerable. So important is laughter to us that humanity highly rewards members of one of the most unusual professions on earth, those who make a living by inducing laughter in others. This is very strange if you stop to think of it: that otherwise sane and responsible citizens should devote their professional energies to causing others to make sharp, explosive barking-like exhalations.

Just as with cars, it's critical to know the fuel efficiency of black holes.

Impartial observers from other planets would consider ours an utterly bizarre enclave if it were populated by birds, defined as flying animals, that nevertheless rarely or never actually flew. They would also be perplexed if they encountered in our seas, lakes, rivers, and ponds, creatures defined as swimmers that never did any swimming. But they would be even more surprised to encounter a species defined as a thinking animal if, in fact, the creature very rarely indulged in actual thinking.

Sometimes things which at the moment may be perceived as obstacles-and actually be obstacles, difficulties, or drawbacks-can in the long run result in some good end which would not have occurred if it had not been for the obstacle.

The problem is that once the untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a religious philosophy - and it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational

Physical fitness is in. I recently had a physical fit myself.