Lenny Bruce (1925–1966) was an influential and controversial American comedian known for his bold and satirical style of stand-up comedy. Born Leonard Alfred Schneider in Mineola, New York, Bruce challenged societal norms and censorship laws with his provocative humor, tackling taboo subjects such as religion, politics, and sexuality. He paved the way for modern comedy by addressing social issues head-on and pushing the boundaries of free speech in his performances. Bruce’s biting wit and incisive social commentary earned him a dedicated following but also subjected him to legal troubles and censorship battles. Despite facing persecution for his comedy, Bruce remained committed to his principles of free expression and artistic integrity. His legacy as a pioneer of modern stand-up comedy continues to inspire comedians to fearlessly confront controversial topics and challenge the status quo.

Lenny Bruce Quotes

1. “The American Constitution was not written to protect criminals; it was written to protect the government from becoming criminals.”
— Lenny Bruce

2. “Marijuana will be legal some day, because the many law students who now smoke pot will someday become congressmen and legalize it in order to protect themselves.”
— Lenny Bruce

3. “Life is a four-letter word.”
— Lenny Bruce

4. “Never trust a preacher with more than two suits.”
— Lenny Bruce

5. “There are no dirty words, only dirty minds.”
— Lenny Bruce

6. “It’s the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness.”
— Lenny Bruce

7. “Let me tell you the truth: The truth is what is. And what should be is a fantasy a terrible, terrible lie that someone gave the people long ago.”
— Lenny Bruce

8. “Freedom of speech is a two way street, man. You have the right to say whatever you want and the Boss has a right to tell the police to arrest you.”
— Lenny Bruce

9. “Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.”
— Lenny Bruce

10. “I tried the religion scam in Miami, so I know how hard that gig is. But, if you can get it to work, starting your own religion is a license to print money.”
— Lenny Bruce

11. “I’ve been accused of bad taste, and I’ll go down to my grave accused of it and always by the same people, the ones who eat in restaurants that reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”
— Lenny Bruce

12. “Darwin’s theory is as dead as he is. Everyone is surviving, fit or not. Years ago, any kid dumb enough to chase a shiny object down a well was dead, and out of the gene pool. Now they got the technology and medicine to save the fool so he can breed more open mouth breathers.”
— Lenny Bruce

13. “Satire is tragedy plus time.”
— Lenny Bruce

14. “What is truth today may be a damn lie next week.”
— Lenny Bruce

15. “If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”
— Lenny Bruce

16. “My mother-in-law broke up my marriage. My wife came home from work one day and found me in bed with her.”
— Lenny Bruce

17. “Miami Beach is where neon goes to die.”
— Lenny Bruce

18. “You know there’s no crooked politicians. There’s never a lie because there is never any truth.”
— Lenny Bruce

19. “If you believe there is a God, a God that made your body, and yet you think that you can do anything with that body that’s dirty, then the fault lies with the manufacturer.”
— Lenny Bruce

20. “There is only what is and that’s it. What should be is a dirty lie.”
— Lenny Bruce

21. “If you live in New York, even if you’re Catholic, you’re Jewish.”
— Lenny Bruce

22. “If something about the human body disgusts you, the fault lies with the manufacturer.”
— Lenny Bruce

23. “There’s a lot of money in wars, except in the war on poverty. Can’t make any bread helping the poor.”
— Lenny Bruce

24. “I am influenced by every second of my waking hour.”
— Lenny Bruce

25. “Once you take away the struggle for food, clothing and shelter, work is the one four letter word that offends everyone.”
— Lenny Bruce

26. “I’m not a comedian. I’m Lenny Bruce.”
— Lenny Bruce

27. “Wouldn’t it be nice if all the people who are lonesome could live in one big dormitory, sleep in beds next to each other, talk, laugh, and keep the lights on as long as they want to?”
— Lenny Bruce

28. “When homosexuals were repressed, you got Tennessee Williams. Today’s tolerance got you Hilton Perez.”
— Lenny Bruce

29. “That’s where the conflict starts. We all want for a wife a combination Sunday school teacher and a $500-a-night hooker.”
— Lenny Bruce

30. “If you can take the hot lead enema, then you can cast the first stone.”
— Lenny Bruce

31. “Even if you are Catholic, if you live in New York you’re Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you are going to be goyish even if you are Jewish.”
— Lenny Bruce

32. “Faith is to the human what sand is to the ostrich.”
— Lenny Bruce

33. “The reason I’m in this business, I assume all performers are – it’s Look at me, Ma! It’s acceptance, you know – Look at me, Ma, look at me, Ma, look at me, Ma. And if your mother watches, you’ll show off till you’re exhausted; but if your mother goes, Ptshew!”
— Lenny Bruce

34. “You can’t do anything with anybody’s body to make it dirty to me. Six people, eight people, one person – you can do only one thing to make it dirty: kill it. Hiroshima was dirty.”
— Lenny Bruce

35. “The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can’t fake it…”
— Lenny Bruce

36. “Every group, every system has a set of values and morals and when you get outside those, then the alarms ring. I was politically incorrect to 95% of the country; luckily my 5% had the bread to come see me.”
— Lenny Bruce

37. “Marijuana is rejected all over the world. Damned. In England heroin is alright for out-patents, but marijuana? They’ll put your ass in jail. I wonder why that is? The only reason could be: To Serve the Devil – Pleasure! Pleasure, which is a dirty word in Christian culture.”
— Lenny Bruce

38. “I wanted out of the navy so bad in ’45, I faked homo to get a discharge. It didn’t matter that the Germans surrendered, I knew we were heading to Japan and I was done with that scene.”
— Lenny Bruce

39. “If I just stuck to pot I might have found out what a drag being an aging hipster actually was.”
— Lenny Bruce

40. “To say whatever nonsense comes into your head without any repercussions has got to be a bigger high than heckling a movie screen in a darkened theater.”
— Lenny Bruce

41. “The ‘what should be’ never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no ‘what should be,’ there is only what is.”
— Lenny Bruce

42. “Every group needs a comedian. A comic who is politically incorrect at the Berkeley campus might slay them at a Klan rally.”
— Lenny Bruce

43. “I’ve talked to biblical cats, and Neanderthals who been here since day one. No one here has even seen the Big Boss. Ever.”
— Lenny Bruce

44. “Once you sleep on feathers you can’t go back to sleeping on the floor.”
— Lenny Bruce

45. “Alright, let’s admit it, we Jews killed Christ – but it was only for three days.”
— Lenny Bruce

46. “You put a guy on a desert island, he’ll do it to mud, a chicken, a barrel, anything, a knothole.”
— Lenny Bruce

47. “I think it’s about time we gave up religion and got back to God.”
— Lenny Bruce

48. “There is nothing sadder than an aging hipster.”
— Lenny Bruce

49. “I would become a priest or a rabbi or a monk or whatever the hell was necessary to perform miracles such as taking money from someone else’s pocket and putting it into mine, still remaining within the confines of the law.”
— Lenny Bruce

50. “Every tribe needs a good front man to sell the program. Who better to convince the Middle East to give up the oil, than a brown man with a Muslim name?”
— Lenny Bruce

51. “There’s always a down side with any freedom. It’s not just homosexual freedom, but any sexual freedom comes at a price, and that is usually art.”
— Lenny Bruce

52. “I don’t want a sharp chick who quotes Kerouac; I just want to hear my old lady say, “Get up and fix the toilet, it’s still making noise.”
— Lenny Bruce

53. “Today’s comedian has a cross to bear that he built himself. A comedian of the older generation did an act and he told the audience, This is my act. Today’s comic is not doing an act. The audience assumes he’s telling the truth. What is truth today may be a damn lie next week.”
— Lenny Bruce

54. “I was a Jew talking about Goyim religion. If I had just stuck to Moses, everything would have been cool. But, copping to being part of the whole Christ murder conspiracy got everyone goose-stepping again.”
— Lenny Bruce

55. “If there was absolute freedom, people would run over babies and charge admission.”
— Lenny Bruce

56. “You got to pay your dues to get the joke. Besides, laughter is cheap and very portable. If there’s a pogrom, or they’re blaming you for the plague, nothing is easier to pack than a sense of humor.”
— Lenny Bruce

57. “Communism is just one big telephone company.”
— Lenny Bruce

58. “I was surprised when Nixon passed the test and showed up in heaven, but, I guess Hitler threw off the curve for our century.”
— Lenny Bruce

59. “What you end up with is outrageousness without the laugh – comedy as electro shock therapy.”
— Lenny Bruce

60. “If I get busted in New York, the freest city in the world, that will be the end of my career.”
— Lenny Bruce

61. “Once the country was settled and built, the bosses changed the order from a stack of educated workers to a barrel of minimum wage lottery dreamers.”
— Lenny Bruce

62. “Certain things are complete superstition and have no validity at all in the Bible. Yeah. They’re just the antithesis of everything that is correct intellectually.”
— Lenny Bruce

63. “You got a million drug laws now because the bosses figured there was more money in putting people in jail than taxing something anyone can grow on a window sill.”
— Lenny Bruce

64. “Anyone who has two shirts when someone has none is not a christian.”
— Lenny Bruce

65. “Trying to figure things out was my gig. Without the human condition, there’s no struggle, no pain and that means no laughter.”
— Lenny Bruce

66. “TV is just advertising for your live gig, so I’m playing whichever show is gonna get me the biggest crowd.”
— Lenny Bruce

67. “The crooks downtown figured out that comedy is like a hammer. It can put up a barn and it can knock down a wall. So they bought it outright and marketed it as Comedy Central.”
— Lenny Bruce

68. “There is only what is.”
— Lenny Bruce

69. “I want to perform an unnatural act.”
— Lenny Bruce

70. “Anyone who does anything for pleasure to indulge his selfish soul will surely burn in Hell.”
— Lenny Bruce

71. “When earth gets good and crowded, like 15th century England, then some new Pilgrims are gonna rocket their Mayflowers to a new solar system.”
— Lenny Bruce

72. “All my humor is based upon destruction and despair.”
— Lenny Bruce

73. “Part of the kick of making people laugh was doing something different. We were a rare breed – spotting one of us was like pinning a space alien, or abdominal snowman. There were maybe a hundred stand-ups in the whole country when I was doing it.”
— Lenny Bruce

74. “Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.”
— Lenny Bruce

75. “All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.”
— Lenny Bruce

76. “I credit the motion picture industry as the strongest environmental factor in molding the children of my day.”
— Lenny Bruce

77. “I’m sure that half the buzz from smoking grass was the fact that it was so illegal.”
— Lenny Bruce

78. “You can’t just run out and start the car until some cat invents a car.”
— Lenny Bruce

79. “I was not born in a vacuum. Every thought I have belongs to someone else.”
— Lenny Bruce

80. “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.”
— Lenny Bruce

81. “With overpopulation, human misery, and the threat of war increasing, we need rather more adult performances from society.”
— Lenny Bruce