Steve Allen famous quotes

04-12-2025

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

#Positive #Nice #Imagination
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.
-- Steve Allen

#Government #Mafia #Balance
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.
-- Steve Allen

#Funny #Dog #Smoking
Radio is the theater of the mind; television is the theater of the mindless.
-- Steve Allen

#Mind #Television #Radio
Ideas have consequences, and totally erroneous ideas are likely to have destructive consequences.
-- Steve Allen

#Ideas #Religion #Destructive
Totalitarianism is patriotism institutionalized.
-- Steve Allen

#Patriotism #Totalitarianism
Civilization itself . . . can easily be swept aside when mob passions are aroused.
-- Steve Allen

#Passion #Civilization #Evil
Humor is a social lubricant that helps us get over some of the bad spots.
-- Steve Allen

#Helping #Social #Spots
Thousands of years ago only Christ could walk on the water. Today anybody can do it; you just step on the garbage.
-- Steve Allen

#Years #Water #Today
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.
-- Steve Allen

#Gratitude #Religious #Atheist
Nothing is better than the unintended humor of reality.
-- Steve Allen

#Reality
In a rational society we would want our presidents to be teachers. In our actual society we insist they be cheerleaders.
-- Steve Allen

#Teacher #President #Want
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.
-- Steve Allen

#Chinese #Religion #Mao
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.
-- Steve Allen

#Laughter #Thinking #Humanity
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.
-- Steve Allen

#Punishment #People #United States
If there is a God, the phrase that must disgust him is - holy war.
-- Steve Allen

#War #If There Is A God #Phrases
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
-- Steve Allen

#Religious #Philosophy #Commitment
Everybody is somewhere.
-- Steve Allen
Physical fitness is in. I recently had a physical fit myself.
-- Steve Allen

#Exercise #Dieting #Fit
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.
-- Steve Allen

#Bible #Religious #Wall
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.
-- Steve Allen

#Bible #Religious #Errors
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.
-- Steve Allen

#Forever #Tonight #Goes On
One social evil for which the New Testament is clearly in part responsible is anti-Semitism.
-- Steve Allen

#Evil #Religion #Social
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.
-- Steve Allen

#Prayer #People #Religion
...we are entitled to make almost any reasonable assumption, but should resist making conclusions until evidence requires that we do so.
-- Steve Allen

#Religion #Assumption #Should

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