Fred Allen Quotes

Treat employees like partners, and they act like partners.

Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars.

What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement.

I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case, and got my tuition back.

Ed Sullivan will be around as long as someone else has talent.

A celebrity is a person who works hard all of their life to become well known, and then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.

I'm a little hoarse tonight. I've been living in Chicago for the past two months, and you know how it is, yelling for help on the way home every night. Things are so tough in Chicago that at Easter time, for bunnies the little kids use porcupines.

The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.

Cocktail party: A gathering held to enable forty people to talk about themselves at the same time. The man who remains after the liquor is gone is the host.

He writes so well he makes me feel like putting my quill back in my goose.

Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in a gnat's navel with room left over for two caraway seeds and an agent's heart.

It is probably not love that makes the world go around, but rather those mutually supportive alliances through which partners recognize their dependence on each other for the achievement of shared and private goals.

Some movie stars wear their sunglasses even in church. They're afraid God might recognize them and ask for autographs.

A committee is a group of the unprepared, appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary.

You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.

An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.

The world is a grindstone and life is your nose

It is bad to suppress laughter. It goes back down and spreads to your hips.

Most of us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats; then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

I don't want to own anything that won't fit into my coffin.

On ships they call them barnacles; in business they attach themselves to desks and are called vice presidents.

California is a fine place to live - if you happen to be an orange.

I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.

My hometown was so dull that one time the tide went out and never came back.

All I know about humor is that I don't know anything about it.

If criticism had any power to harm, the skunk would be extinct by now.

Condensed milk is wonderful. I don't see how they can get a cow to sit down on those little cans.

If the grass is greener in the other fellow's yard- let him worry about cutting it.

An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer.

I play a musical instrument a little, but only for my own amazement.

Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.

An income tax form is like a laundry list - either way you lose your shirt.

A psychiatrists is the next man you start talking to after you start talking to yourself.

During the Samuel Johnson days they had big men enjoying small talk; today we have small men enjoying big talk.

A gentleman is any man who wouldn't hit a woman with his hat on.

A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.

Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.

The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference.

Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.

Her hat is a creation that will never go out of style; it will just look ridiculous year after year.

Everything is for the eye these days - TV, Life, Look, the movies. Nothing is just for the mind. The next generation will have eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all.

After quitting radio I was able to live on the money I saved on aspirins.

If I could get my membership fee back, I'd resign from the human race.

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.

Radio is called a medium because it is rare that anything is well done.

Vaudeville could not vouch for the honesty, the integrity, or the mentality of the individuals who collectively made up the horde the medium embraced. All the human race demands of its members is that they be born. That is all vaudeville demanded. You just had to be born. You could be ignorant and be a star. You could be a moron and be wealthy. The elements that went to make up vaudeville were combed from the jungles, the four corners of the world, the intelligentsia and the subnormal.

My father never raised his hand to any one of his children, except in self-defense.

English coffee tastes like water that has been squeezed out of a wet sleeve.