Top 90 Alan Alda Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won’t come in.”

— Alan Alda

2. “Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.”

— Alan Alda

3. “Insanity is just a state of mind.”

— Alan Alda

4. “Laugh at yourself, but don’t ever aim your doubt at yourself.”

— Alan Alda

5. “Our lives depend on good communication. Good communication helps personal relationships, it helps bosses and employees get along better. We rely on it.”

— Alan Alda

6. “Be brave enough to live creatively.”

— Alan Alda

7. “The best things said come last. People will talk for hours saying nothing much and then linger at the door with words that come with a rush from the heart.”

— Alan Alda

8. “War is war and Hell is hell, and if you ask me, War is a lot worse.”

— Alan Alda

9. “In the midst of the sense of tragedy or loss, sometimes laughter is not only healing, it’s a way of experiencing the person that you’ve lost again.”

— Alan Alda

10. “You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you’re doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.”

— Alan Alda

11. “Loneliness is everything it’s cracked up to be.”

— Alan Alda

12. “Jean Paul Sartre says in “No Exit” that hell is other people. Well, our task in life is to make it heaven. Or at least earth.”

— Alan Alda

13. “It’s better to be wise than to be smart.”

— Alan Alda

14. “At times you have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.”

— Alan Alda

15. “My relationship with science is as someone who’s curious and hungry to know, hungry to understand. So all I have to offer is my ignorance and my curiosity, which is a good combination, as long as they come together.”

— Alan Alda

16. “Aren’t we lucky to be us?”

— Alan Alda

17. “I found I wasn’t asking good enough questions because I assumed I knew something.”

— Alan Alda

18. “The person who’s communicating something is responsible for how well the other person follows him.”

— Alan Alda

19. “Originality is unexplored territory. You get there by carrying a canoe – you can’t take a taxi.”

— Alan Alda

20. “Nothing important was ever accomplished without chutzpah. Columbus had chutzpah. The signers of the Declaration of Independence had chutzpah. Don’t ever aim doubt at yourself. Laugh at yourself, but don’t doubt yourself.”

— Alan Alda

21. “Real conversation can’t happen if listening is just my waiting for you to finish talking.”

— Alan Alda

22. “For humans, flying isn’t magic, it’s physics.”

— Alan Alda

23. “Life is great-I wouldn’t know what I’d do without it.”

— Alan Alda

24. “I’ll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I’ll even ‘hari-kari’ if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun!”

— Alan Alda

25. “The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.”

— Alan Alda

26. “Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You cannot get there by bus, only by hard work, risking and by not quite knowing what you are doing. What you will discover will be wonderful; yourself.”

— Alan Alda

27. “I’ve been lucky enough to live through all the things that are supposed to give meaning to our lives, like parenting, grandparenting, art, celebrity. All these things you expect meaning to come from, and sometimes it comes when you’re not expecting it.”

— Alan Alda

28. “As I am becoming older, the only thing that speeds up is time.”

— Alan Alda

29. “The trouble with a lecture is that it answers questions that haven’t been asked.”

— Alan Alda

30. “People who laugh together generally don’t kill each other.”

— Alan Alda

31. “We’re highly social animals – I’m told by scientists that what makes us different from other animals is an acute social awareness, which is what has made us so successful.”

— Alan Alda

32. “Even when we think of empathy as a tool for good, it might not be a good idea to oversell its strengths, and we should remember that there will always be people who will use it against others for their own benefit.”

— Alan Alda

33. “Some of the greatest things, as I understand, they have come about by serendipity, the greatest discoveries.”

— Alan Alda

34. “Republicans are as capable of coming up with great ideas and moving this country along as anyone – they just don’t do it.”

— Alan Alda

35. “For me, I find that even though I’ve accomplished a few things in my life, looking back on accomplishments doesn’t give me a sense of satisfaction.”

— Alan Alda

36. “It’s too bad I’m not as wonderful a person as people say I am, because the world could use a few people like that.”

— Alan Alda

37. “The good thing about being a hypocrite is that you get to keep your values.”

— Alan Alda

38. “Awards can give you a tremendous amount of encouragement to keep getting better, no matter how young or old you are.”

— Alan Alda

39. “My mother didn’t try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.”

— Alan Alda

40. “I have a final word of advice to our students. If you work very, very hard, this is the kind of actor, writer and director you may turn out to be, and if you work extra hard, this is the kind of person you may turn out to be.”

— Alan Alda

41. “Ignorance was my ally as long as it was backed up by curiosity. Ignorance without curiosity is not so good, but with curiosity it was the clear water through which I could see the coins at the bottom of the fountain.”

— Alan Alda

42. “I was brought up as a Catholic, and I’m no longer a Catholic. I don’t talk about my beliefs too much in public probably because I feel very strongly that it’s something personal – more than personal, it’s private.”

— Alan Alda

43. “I’m very interested in the improvisation because one of the things I do is to help train scientists to communicate in a better way and more personal way when they’re making a presentation, and I use improvisation to do that.”

— Alan Alda

44. “I play tennis non-obsessively. I seem to beat people I play a lot or half the time, so I guess I gravitate to people who are as bad as I am.”

— Alan Alda

45. “What then are doing if not creating a better place together? I think, for me the key has to be, what do I want to create? What is it I want to leave behind?”

— Alan Alda

46. “When your kids turn 13, an alien being invades their bodies and doesn’t leave until they’re 20.”

— Alan Alda

47. “I have thought about punching people out. Sometimes, I’ve thought, ‘Why don’t I just act on that impulse?’ But then, I’ve never hit anybody in anger. Hey! I’ve never hit anybody for fun.”

— Alan Alda

Featured in: Fun Quotes

48. “It isn’t necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It’s only necessary to be rich.”

— Alan Alda

49. “When does she do all this thinking? We’re together all the time but she thinks deeply about things and with feeling and she can remember the facts. We’ve been married 48 years.”

— Alan Alda

50. “Being mystified is a good beginning, because you won’t do what you’ve done before.”

— Alan Alda