Top 60 Fred Allen Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Fred Allen

Featured in: Education Quotes, Quotes About Laughter

2. “Treat employees like partners, and they act like partners.”

— Fred Allen

3. “I don’t want to own anything that won’t fit into my coffin.”

— Fred Allen

4. “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.”

— Fred Allen

5. “I don’t have to look up my family tree, because I know that I’m the sap.”

— Fred Allen

6. “California is a fine place to live – if you happen to be an orange.”

— Fred Allen

7. “I like long walks, especially when they’re taken by people who annoy me.”

— Fred Allen

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

— Fred Allen

9. “He was so narrow minded that if he fell on a pin it would blind him in both eyes.”

— Fred Allen

10. “He dreamed he was eating shredded wheat and woke up to find the mattress half gone.”

— Fred Allen

11. “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.”

— Fred Allen

12. “The world is a grindstone and life is your nose.”

— Fred Allen

13. “He’s so small, he’s a waste of skin.”

— Fred Allen

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

— Fred Allen

15. “A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 AM and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 PM to make this molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished before lunch.”

— Fred Allen

16. “It was once rumored that fledgling executives walked around their offices backwards so they wouldn’t have to face an issue.”

— Fred Allen

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

— Fred Allen

18. “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.”

— Fred Allen

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

— Fred Allen

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

20. “Everywhere outside New York City is Bridgeport, Connecticut.”

— Fred Allen

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

— Fred Allen

22. “When Jack Benny plays the violin, it sounds as though the strings are still in the cat.”

— Fred Allen

23. “If the grass is greener in the other fellow’s yard- let him worry about cutting it.”

— Fred Allen

24. “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.”

— Fred Allen

25. “Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.”

— Fred Allen

26. “All that the comedian has to show for his years of work and aggravation is the echo of forgotten laughter.”

— Fred Allen

27. “If I could get my membership fee back, I’d resign from the human race.”

— Fred Allen

28. “Hollywood is a great place if you’re an orange.”

— Fred Allen

29. “Radio is a bag of mediocrity where little men with carbon minds wallow in sluice of their own making.”

— Fred Allen

30. “Imitation is the sincerest form of television.”

— Fred Allen

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

— Fred Allen

32. “She used to be a teacher but she has no class now.”

— Fred Allen

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

— Fred Allen

34. “With the advance of refrigeration, I hope that along with the frozen foods someday we will have frozen conversation. A person will be able to keep a frozen promise indefinitely.”

— Fred Allen

35. “He always had a chip on his shoulder that he was ready to use to kindle an argument.”

— Fred Allen

36. “We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.”

— Fred Allen

37. “A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.”

— Fred Allen

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

— Fred Allen

39. “The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.”

— Fred Allen

40. “I’m going to Boston to see my doctor. He’s a very sick man.”

— Fred Allen

41. “There are two kinds of jokes – funny jokes and Jack Benny jokes.”

— Fred Allen

42. “My agent gets 10 percent of everything I get, except the blinding headaches.”

— Fred Allen

43. “If children could vote, Jesse Jackson would be our next president.”

— Fred Allen

44. “Father Time is the make-up man responsible for the physical changes that determine the parts the average actor is to play.”

— Fred Allen

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

— Fred Allen

46. “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.”

— Fred Allen

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

— Fred Allen

48. “The average vice-president is a form of executive fungus that attaches itself to a desk. On a boat this growth would be called a barnacle.”

— Fred Allen

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

— Fred Allen

50. “Success is like dealing with your kid or teaching your wife to drive. Sooner or later you’ll end up in the police station.”

— Fred Allen