Top 40 Harry Shearer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I was a Political Science major.”

— Harry Shearer

2. “If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?”

— Harry Shearer

3. “I am one of those people who thrive on deadlines. Nothing brings on inspiration more readily than desperation.”

— Harry Shearer

4. “Well Washington DC what are you going to do. They think the capitol steps are the state of the art in comedy. You try to drag them into the 20th century let alone the 21st and they refuse to come with you.”

— Harry Shearer

5. “Even under the best of circumstances men are hard creatures to trap. Women who flatter themselves into thinking they’ve trapped one are like people who believe they can get rid of the cockroaches in their kitchen. They’re in for a big surprise late one night when they turn on the light.”

— Harry Shearer

6. “Privilege has its own way of seeing the world.”

— Harry Shearer

7. “I went to graduate school at Harvard for one year I worked in the state legislature in Sacramento for one year. I taught school in Compton for two years.”

— Harry Shearer

8. “I always used to sit next to Mel Blanc when we’d do the shows. When you have Jack Benny on one side and Mel Blanc on the other, you’re not going to go far wrong.”

— Harry Shearer

9. “In the year and a half I was on SNL, I never saw anybody ad lib anything. For a very good reason – the director cut according to the script. So, if you ad libbed, you’d be off mike and off camera.”

— Harry Shearer

10. “Democrats always like to brag that their guys are smarter than the opponents and Republicans always like to brag that their guys are more moral than the opponents. But if you’re looking for morals in politics you’re looking for bananas in the cheese department.”

— Harry Shearer

11. “My parents didn’t want me to be a regular in a series. I was a working actor from time to time but they thought was a little too much being a star of a series. They wanted me to have a slightly more normal childhood.”

— Harry Shearer

12. “The last president we had was the smartest guy anyone could remember and he did the dumbest thing anyone has ever seen in the White House so go figure.”

— Harry Shearer

13. “To do then now would be retro. To do then then was very now-tro, if you will.”

— Harry Shearer

14. “Music can happen with equal ease as a solo or collaborative venture, it seems to me.”

— Harry Shearer

15. “For a guy who is always banging on about the masculine virtues, Nixon had this remarkable proclivity for very dainty gestures.”

— Harry Shearer

16. “You know, radio was a really easy way to do the shows. You’d come in, do a read-through, there’d be a few rehearsals, then you’d come the night of the show and do it in front of the audience and then go home.”

— Harry Shearer

17. “When it moved to Friday night it disappeared, when they find another show that can do what The Simpsons does, they will be delighted to do cancel The Simpsons.”

— Harry Shearer

18. “As a kid, I really did want to hang out with the grownups, so it was hanging out with the hippest grownups in the world. This was the nicest bunch of people I’ve worked with in show business, with the exception of the people around A Mighty Wind. It really was a wonderful eight years.”

— Harry Shearer

19. “I didn’t have a lot of independent film connections. It really took until the digital film revolution came along that I realized that I could do it myself.”

— Harry Shearer

20. “A movie script more than anything else is a plan of action for the crew. Everybody in the crew looks at the script to see what they’re going to do. It has to contain where you are, and how many people are there, and what they do, and what time of day it is, and what time of year it is.”

— Harry Shearer

21. “You can get an awful lot of effects into the customer’s mind for a great deal less time and money in radio than you can in television.”

— Harry Shearer

22. “The hardest work most of us do is maintaining the appearance of normality.”

— Harry Shearer

23. “When I was growing up, we learned our history almost as lives of the saints. And it came as a shock, “Oh, Jefferson had slaves?” It always comes as a shock to us that elevation to the White House didn’t somehow cleanse them of all their deep character flaws.”

— Harry Shearer

24. “I wasn’t playing Nixon’s satirical stick figure. I was playing Nixon the man. As an actor, I felt I had to get to the deeply flawed humanity of the guy.”

— Harry Shearer

25. “The first thing you’ve got to do is know your craft, and then you can do something else with it.”

— Harry Shearer

26. “I’ve got an odd, negative bond with C. Montgomery Burns. He reminds a lot of people of bosses they’ve worked for. He certainly reminds me of someone I’m working for.”

— Harry Shearer

27. “The act of getting married, stripped of the necessity to have a secure setting to raise children, seems to me no less grim than registering your emotions with the government.”

— Harry Shearer

28. “Nixon’s genius was that he was able to portray himself as the toughest of the anti-communists, and yet run on a platform that he had a plan to end the Vietnam War. And, of course, his plan was to prolong it until his second election – but he didn’t tell us that then.”

— Harry Shearer

29. “Music often happens even faster than comedy in terms of the creation.”

— Harry Shearer

30. “I think the British learn their history through the prism of this gallery of grotesques known as the royals.”

— Harry Shearer

31. “I’m not sure that there’s anybody else that’s as psychologically complex and who’s given us this window into his soul that Nixon gave us. That’s what I find absolutely addictive and seductive.”

— Harry Shearer

32. “I have a very strong visual memory of the first time I made him laugh. That was remarkable. I was like, “Oh, God, I just made Jack Benny laugh.””

— Harry Shearer

33. “Well I directed a few feature length things for HBO in the late eighties.”

— Harry Shearer

34. “If you’re going to do something that lasts 90 minutes, you can’t really do it with stick figures.”

— Harry Shearer

35. “The theater business is very much about “Hey, if you want our big blockbuster at Christmas time, you’ll play our piece of crap in April.””

— Harry Shearer

36. “I was never into candy and games and clowns.”

— Harry Shearer

37. “You have to do real acting, not just do a voice.”

— Harry Shearer

38. “I think in most cases, if you’re with good people, comedy creation happens faster in collaboration. That’s how I can tell if it’s a good collaboration: If it’s faster than me by myself, then it works. If it’s slower than me by myself, then I get out of the room.”

— Harry Shearer

39. “Anybody who says that having the public recognize them and relate to the work they do is irritating should get into another line of work. You’re in this business for people to know what you do and like it.”

— Harry Shearer

40. “I would come back to public school for usually about half the year. It was actually better for me to be out of school a lot, because I was two years younger than everybody, which is a bad situation, socially.”

— Harry Shearer

41. “Nobody makes a movie thinking it’s still going to be watched and talked about and quoted 20 years later.”

— Harry Shearer

42. “If Nixon were a Republican senator today, he would have been primaried out.”

— Harry Shearer

43. “I’d always loved radio.”

— Harry Shearer

44. “You’re not just looking for laughs, but you’re trying to do the characters first, and then the laughs come afterwards.”

— Harry Shearer

45. “Sometimes, songs spill out of you very fast, and sometimes you have to wrangle them to the floor. But the same thing is true of comedy, where sometimes it really flows.”

— Harry Shearer

46. “When Nixon died, on my radio show I started doing sketches with three basic conceits: One, there’s a place called Heaven. Two, Nixon got in. And three, he’s still taping.”

— Harry Shearer