John Cleese Quotes

“A man will give up almost anything except his suffering.”

“A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people.”

“Acting is all about faking. We're all very good at faking things that we have no competence with.”

“All humans are stupid, but the smarter ones at least have a handle on their own ignorance.”

“As we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.”

“Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.”

“Four hundred years ago, we would have been burnt for this film (The Life of Brian). Now, I'm suggesting that we've made an advance.”

“He who laughs most, learns best.”

“I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.”

“I have several times made a poor choice by avoiding a necessary confrontation.”

“I think that money spoils most things, once it becomes the primary motivating force.”

“I think the problem with people like this is that they are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are.”

“I used to desire many, many things, but now I have just one desire, and that's to get rid of all my other desires.”

“I'm always meeting new people, and my list of friends seems to change quite a bit.”

“I'm not saying Obama is right on everything. Of course not. He may be wrong on a number of things. But what I do know is that he behaves like a very, very sane man almost all the time.”

“I'm struck by how laughter connects you with people. It's almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you're just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy.”

“If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?”

“If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.”

“Laughter is a force for democracy.”

“Nothing will stop you being creative more effectively as the fear of making a mistake.”

“One of our professors described a lecture as 'a mystical process by which the notes on the pad of the lecturer pass on to the pad of the student, without passing through the mind of either'.”

“Only a few things in life matter a little. The rest don’t matter at all.”

“Technology frightens me to death. It's designed by engineers to impress other engineers. And they always come with instruction booklets that are written by engineers for other engineers — which is why almost no technology ever works.”

“The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is what I absolutely do not subscribe to.”

“The most creative people have this childlike facility to play.”

“The one thing I remember about Christmas was that my father used to take me out in a boat about ten miles offshore on Christmas Day, and I used to have to swim back. Extraordinary. It was a ritual.
Mind you, that wasn't the hard part. The difficult bit was getting out of the sack.”

“The sad thing about true stupidity is that you can do absolutely nothing about it.”

“This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.”

“Too many people confuse being serious with being solemn.”

“We don't know where we get our ideas from. What we do know is that we do not get them from our laptops.”