Top 180 Andy Rooney Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it.”

— Andy Rooney

Featured in: Happiness Quotes, Business Quotes

2. “I’ve learned that life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.”

— Andy Rooney

3. “Being kind is more important than being right.”

— Andy Rooney

4. “Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them.”

— Andy Rooney

5. “If you smile when no one else is around, you really mean it.”

— Andy Rooney

Featured in: Smile Quotes

6. “Great teachers are usually a little crazy.”

— Andy Rooney

7. “The best thing about a vacation is planning it.”

— Andy Rooney

8. “The 50-50-90 rule: anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there’s a 90% probability you’ll get it wrong.”

— Andy Rooney

9. “Walking is good for the soul.”

— Andy Rooney

10. “Most of us end up with no more than five or six people who remember us. Teachers have thousands of people who remember them for the rest of their lives.”

— Andy Rooney

11. “The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.”

— Andy Rooney

12. “The great virtue of being alone is that your mind can go its own way.”

— Andy Rooney

13. “Guns do not make you a killer. I think killing makes you a killer. You can kill someone with a baseball bat or a car, but no one is trying to ban you from driving to the ball game.”

— Andy Rooney

14. “Go to bed. Whatever you’re staying up late for isn’t worth it.”

— Andy Rooney

15. “I’ve learned that under everyone’s hard shell is someone who wants to be appreciated and loved.”

— Andy Rooney

16. “It’s paradoxical that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn’t appeal to anyone.”

— Andy Rooney

17. “Women realize it’s not worth buying an entire pig just to get a little sausage!”

— Andy Rooney

18. “Everyone starts out being an atheist. No one is born with belief in anything. Infants are atheists until they are indoctrinated.”

— Andy Rooney

19. “People like to say, “You’re only as old as you feel,” but it isn’t true. It’s just something old people say to make themselves feel good about their age. You’re as old as you are.”

— Andy Rooney

20. “I’ve learned that no matter how serious your life requires you to be, everyone needs a friend to act goofy with.”

— Andy Rooney

21. “My advice is not to wait to be struck by an idea. If you’re a writer, you sit down and damn well decide to have an idea. That’s the way to get an idea.”

— Andy Rooney

22. “Familiar things are a comfort to us all.”

— Andy Rooney

23. “Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don’t need to be done.”

— Andy Rooney

24. “Happiness depends more on how life strikes you than on what happens.”

— Andy Rooney

25. “We need people who can actually do things. We have too many bosses and too few workers.”

— Andy Rooney

26. “Don’t rule out working with your hands. It does not preclude using your head.”

— Andy Rooney

27. “The two biggest sellers in any bookstore are the cookbooks and the diet books. The cookbooks tell you how to prepare the food, and the diet books tell you how not to eat any of it!”

— Andy Rooney

28. “You’re almost always better off keeping your mouth shut, but don’t let that stop you from popping off.”

— Andy Rooney

29. “All men are not created equal but should be treated as though they were under the law.”

— Andy Rooney

30. “The last birthday that’s any good is 23.”

— Andy Rooney

31. “It’s best to give advice in only two circumstances; when it’s requested, and when it’s a life threatening situation.”

— Andy Rooney

32. “The English language is more complex than calculus because numbers don’t have nuances.”

— Andy Rooney

33. “I didn’t get old on purpose, it just happened. If you’re lucky, it could happen to you.”

— Andy Rooney

34. “We’re all torn between the desire for privacy and the fear of lonliness. We need each other and we need to get away from each other. We need proximity and distance, conversation and silence. We almost always get more of each than we want at any one time.”

— Andy Rooney

35. “Men wake up aroused in the morning. We can’t help it. We just wake up and we want you. And the women are thinking, “How can he want me the way I look in the morning?” It’s because we can’t see you. We have no blood anywhere near our optic nerve.”

— Andy Rooney

36. “One of my major shortcomings – I’m vindictive. I don’t know why that is. Even in petty things in my life I tend to strike back. It’s a lot more pleasurable a sensation than feeling threatened.”

— Andy Rooney

37. “Most of us believe everyone has a right to his own opinion – as long as it agrees with ours.”

— Andy Rooney

38. “I’d like to be rich enough so I could throw soap away after the letters are worn off.”

— Andy Rooney

39. “Creativity is a by-product of hard work. If I never have another really new idea, it won’t matter.”

— Andy Rooney

40. “I am interested in details. If you go into anything far enough, you get into the details of it, and people turn out to be interested in what makes things work.”

— Andy Rooney

41. “Most of us aren’t that interested in getting rich- we just don’t want to get poor.”

— Andy Rooney

42. “New ideas are one of the most overrated concepts of our time. Most of the important ideas that we live with aren’t new at all.”

— Andy Rooney

43. “It isn’t working that’s so hard, it’s getting ready to work.”

— Andy Rooney

44. “In the futile attempts we all make to tidy up our lives and our surroundings, nothing is more difficult than throwing out a book.”

— Andy Rooney

45. “I am not retiring. Writers don’t retire. Writers never stop writing.”

— Andy Rooney

46. “Never trust the food in a restaurant on top of the tallest building in town that spends a lot of time folding napkins.”

— Andy Rooney

47. “Dogs are nicer than people.”

— Andy Rooney

48. “The biggest seller is cookbooks and the second is diet books – how not to eat what you’ve just learned how to cook.”

— Andy Rooney

49. “All economists should be locked up until they admit that they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

— Andy Rooney

50. “Civilization means conforming to a standard of behavior that may not seem natural to us.”

— Andy Rooney