Top 180 John Cleese Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve.”

— John Cleese

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

— John Cleese

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

— John Cleese

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4. “What have the Romans ever done for us?”

— John Cleese

5. “A satisfied customer. We should have him stuffed.”

— John Cleese

6. “My hovercraft is full of eels.”

— John Cleese

7. “Life is a terminal disease, and it is sexually transmitted.”

— John Cleese

8. “Laughter is the best creative medicine.”

— John Cleese

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

— John Cleese

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

— John Cleese

11. “When you’re being stalked by an angry mob with raspberries, the first thing to do is to release a tiger.”

— John Cleese

12. “Telling people how to be creative is easy – being creative is difficult.”

— John Cleese

13. “He who laughs most, learns best.”

— John Cleese

14. “While you’re being creative, nothing is wrong. There’s no such thing as a mistake, and any drivel may lead to the breakthrough.”

— John Cleese

15. “Your Mother was A Hamster and you Father Smelled of elder berries.”

— John Cleese

16. “Because, 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.”

— John Cleese

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

— John Cleese

18. “We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, “I wish I hadn’t been born?” Once you’re born you’ll have to die, now is that funny or sad?”

— John Cleese

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

— John Cleese

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

— John Cleese

21. “If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time to be considering alternative strategies.”

— John Cleese

22. “It’s easier to be creative if you’ve got other people to play with.”

— John Cleese

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

— John Cleese

24. “No hope for planet at all. But I will be gone before the planet is gone, so it’s your problem.”

— John Cleese

25. “When we hold a World Championship for a particular sport, we invite teams from other countries to play as well.”

— John Cleese

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

— John Cleese

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

— John Cleese

28. “How to defend yourself against a banana.”

— John Cleese

29. “Manuel will show you to your rooms – if you’re lucky.”

— John Cleese

30. “Laughter is a force for democracy.”

— John Cleese

31. “Oh, I could spend my life having this conversation – look – please try to understand before one of us dies.”

— John Cleese

32. “If you really don’t know where to start or if you’re stuck, start generating random connections and allow your intuition to tell you if one might lead somewhere interesting.”

— John Cleese

33. “There are 3 basic differences between we British and you Americans. One, we speak English, and you don’t. Two, when we have a “World Championship”, we invite teams from other nations. Three, when you meet the British head of State, you only have to get down on one knee.”

— John Cleese

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

— John Cleese

35. “Come to me. I want to plow you like a Calgary driveway at Christmas.”

— John Cleese

36. “When you get to my age, and I’m 66 now, you realize that the world is a madhouse and that most people are operating in fantasy anyway. So once you realise that, it doesn’t bother you much.”

— John Cleese

37. “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him enter regional distribution codes in data field 97 to facilitate regression analysis on the back end.”

— John Cleese

38. “My mum died about three years ago at the age of 101, and just towards the end, as she began to run out of energy, she did actually stop trying to tell me what to do most of the time.”

— John Cleese

39. “Muslims, who have a completely different value system, come to the West, then they should accept that there are certain basic values in the West intrinsic to our culture. Just as I wouldn’t suggest that any Westerner walk down the streets of Saudi Arabia in a bikini.”

— John Cleese

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

— John Cleese

41. “You do realize as you grow older that almost nobody knows what they are talking about.”

— John Cleese

42. “I can never do better than Fawlty Towers whatever I do. Now I very much want to teach young talent some rules of the game.”

— John Cleese

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

— John Cleese

44. “I was very sad to hear of the death of Ronnie Barker, who was such a warm, friendly and encouraging presence to have when I started in television. He was also a great comic actor to learn from.”

— John Cleese

45. “I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you’re left thinking, ‘Well, what’s going on?’”

— John Cleese

46. “There’s nothing good on the television; let’s burn a witch. It must have been terribly exciting to live in those times.”

— John Cleese

47. “I think that the real religion is about the understanding that if we can only still our egos for a few seconds, we might have a chance of experiencing something that is divine in nature.”

— John Cleese

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

— John Cleese

49. “The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.”

— John Cleese

50. “We need to be in the open mode when we are pondering a problem, but, once we come up with a solution, we must then switch to the closed mode to implement it.”

— John Cleese