Top 40 John Dunning Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What’s that old cowboy saying? Never was a horse that couldn’t be rode, never was a man who couldn’t be throwed.”

— John Dunning

2. “MAJOR HOOPLE, situation comedy, based on the comic strip Our Boarding House, by Gene Ahern.”

— John Dunning

3. “We have the knowledge, resources, and capabilities to make global capitalism work in a more inclusive and socially responsible manner while retaining – indeed enhancing – its economic benefits.”

— John Dunning

4. “The influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.”

— John Dunning

5. “I’m doing what I like, why wouldn’t I be happy? So what if it’s not perfect, I don’t believe in perfection. Maybe happy’s as good as it gets.”

— John Dunning

6. “This is why I am not religious. If and when we do learn the true secret of the universe, some kind of religion will be there to hide it. To cover it up. To persecute and shred, to burn and destroy. They stay in business by keeping us in the Dark Ages.”

— John Dunning

7. “Kenny Baker, brought another dimension of comedy to the singer’s role, the addled young man with the voice of gold. His tenure was solid, four full seasons. He was almost, but not quite, the answer in the singer’s role.”

— John Dunning

8. “The world was getting dangerously crowded with crazy people.”

— John Dunning

9. “The revival of The Couple Next Door in 1957 had Peg Lynch and Alan Bunce playing the same characters they had created on Ethel and Albert. But the characters referred to each other only as “dear” and were never named.”

— John Dunning

10. “Dr. Benjamin Ordway, the hero of Crime Doctor, was one of radio’s classic amnesia cases. Originally a criminal himself, he lost his memory after a blow on the head. With the help of a kind doctor, he built a new life and a new identity, studying medicine and eventually going into psychiatry. When Dr. Ordway regained his memory, his new life was complete: he decided to specialize in criminal psychology because of his understanding of the criminal mind.”

— John Dunning

11. “There is no better indicators of character than the books you have.”

— John Dunning

12. “It Pays to Be Ignorant was radio’s lamebrained answer to such intellectual quizzes as Information, Please and The Quiz Kids. It was a feast of the absurd in which questions were asked but seldom answered. The three nitwits who made up the “board of experts” spent most of the time trying to figure out what the questions were, between rambling monologues, irrelevancies, and rude interruptions.”

— John Dunning

13. “These shows have all been in circulation more than 20 years. Since then: almost nothing. Connoisseurs of the Hollywood run generally disdain the New York shows as inferior product. But as William Faulkner once said, “Given a choice between Scotch and nothing, I’ll take Scotch.”

— John Dunning

14. “A far more serious loss that year was Oscar Levant, who left as Maurice Zolotow reported, “when a series of arguments with Golenpaul culminated in a fistfight.”

— John Dunning

15. “Adams, then in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, could only appear in the premiere program. He died in 1960; Levant in 1972; Golenpaul in 1974; Kieran in 1981. Fadiman became chairman of the Book-of-the-Month Club board of judges and went on with his literary.”

— John Dunning

16. “We’re all running away. Some of us just don’t get very far.”

— John Dunning

17. “Benny’s most famous gag, when a robber demanded, “Your money or your life!” and the hilarity kept building while Benny thought it over.”

— John Dunning

18. “The Benny of the air was a fraud, a myth, a creation. It should have surprised no one to learn – after years of toupee jokes that played so well into the vanity theme – that Benny never wore one. He overtipped in restaurants, gave away his time in countless benefit performances, and was lavish in his praise of almost everyone else. “Where would I be today without my writers, without Rochester, Dennis Day, Mary Livingstone, Phil Harris, and Don Wilson?” he asked a Newsweek profiler in 1947.”

— John Dunning

19. “The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.”

— John Dunning

20. “Hawk Larabee was radio’s first half-hearted attempt at an adult western drama, a concept that was not fully realized until the arrival of Gunsmoke five years later.”

— John Dunning

21. “Orson Welles answered almost everything thrown at him, prompting Fadiman to comment dryly, “This is your last appearance on this program, Mr. Welles.”

— John Dunning

22. “The premiere broadcast of Blind Date set the style of this lively show. In the middle of the stage in Radio City’s Studio 6A was a partition. To the right were the studio orchestra, hostess Arlene Francis, and six servicemen carefully selected as contestants: to the left, three beautiful women drawn from the ranks of the screen, radio, and modeling professions. The object was to arrange blind dates pairing three of the servicemen and the three women on opposite sides of the partition.”

— John Dunning

23. “This much is certain. In April 1930, Radio Station WGHP in Detroit was purchased by John King and George W. Trendle, partners who had just liquidated a chain of movie theaters. They planned to make the station “the last word in radio,” and soon changed the call letters to WXYZ, to reflect this motto.”

— John Dunning

24. “Sinatra’s final radio days were filled with minor quarter-hours and one full-length series in which he was relegated to the role of a disc jockey. By 1950 people were writing his professional obituary. His public image had taken a beating, his personal life a succession of wives, scrapes, and alleged friendships with gangsters. It would take a 1953 film, From Here to Eternity, and a subsequent acting career to save him.”

— John Dunning

25. “In 1952, he was to begin a TV series when he suffered his first heart attack. He returned on CBS TV as a panelist for the game show What’s My Line? He died on the night of March 17, 1956, collapsing just outside the West 75th Street home of a friend.”

— John Dunning

26. “GLENN MILLER, the epitome of big bands, a group that burst on the scene in 1938, reached the heights, and spent its primary career in five years. Miller was a trombonist, unable to match the technical ability of Tommy Dorsey or the creativity of Jack Teagarden. But he was a superb arranger who knew what he wanted and how to find the men who could produce that esteemed sound. Miller disappeared over the English Channel in December 1944.”

— John Dunning

27. “After a short trial as a weekly show, the serial leaped to a 1932 rating of 25 points, becoming one of the all-time favorites of the air. Berg journeyed into the Lower East Side for her research, browsing among the rat-infested tenements, vegetable stands, and pushcarts. She went incognito, to avoid inhibiting the people with her celebrity. She did take a Radio Mirror reporter on a tour through narrow Orchard Street in 1936, showing him the wellspring of The Goldbergs.”

— John Dunning

28. “The stories reveal little or no religious dogma: they are virtually indistinguishable from other high-quality anthologies on the air. There were 482 dramas broadcast. Father Peyton himself released almost the entire run to collectors. In 1967 he published his autobiography, All for Her, which includes several chapters on his radio work.”

— John Dunning

29. “Newspapers ran the wrong mugshots, and it was the self-fulfilling prophecy: the studios, believing his name had been damaged, canceled his contracts. Only four years later did Hopalong Cassidy ride up and save him. Boyd made more than 50 Cassidy films with Sherman, and another dozen on his own between 1943 and 1946. His acquisition of the Cassidy film library was complete by 1948, when he joined the Whites in the radio venture.”

— John Dunning

30. “Baker interviewed the elderly from all walks of life. Subjects were all at least 70 years old, and most were happy to tell of life in simpler times. There were veterans of the war with Spain, oldtime reporters from newspapers of the 1880s, people who were young when the century turned.”

— John Dunning

31. “The NBC University Theater combined superb drama with college credit. Its productions were fully the equal of any commercial radio series and better than most, though it got stuck with the “education” stigma early in its run and never attained much more than its targeted academically motivated audience.”

— John Dunning

32. “After these walk-ons, she would banter with announcer Ken Niles and perhaps indulge in more stargazing. In her memoir, radio actress Mary Jane Higby recalls working the show. The “underpaid radio actors” soon took to calling themselves “the Gay Ad-Libbers.” They “would circle the microphone, trying to simulate people having a marvelous time. ‘What fun to be here!’ they would cry. ‘My, doesn’t Myrna Loy look gorgeous! Whoops, there’s Bette Davis!”

— John Dunning

33. “A listen to tapes only confirms the judgment of contemporary critics. This was truly a bad show, a creaking monstrosity, an ill wind whose time had inexplicably come. Who cared if the contestant won the refrigerator? Refrigerators were boring.”

— John Dunning

34. “When the series tackled freedom of religion, it wasn’t simply with another show on Roger Williams: instead it told of Dr. Martin Niemoeller, who defied Hitler’s German Christian Church and was imprisoned for his trouble.”

— John Dunning

35. “Some questions were years old, and as the jackpots grew, so did the difficulty of finding people who had now moved elsewhere. Some winners never were found.”

— John Dunning

36. “Parsons was known for ruthlessness and a long memory. The biggest celebrities in America came when “invited,” with Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, and Greta Garbo among the few to ignore Parsons’s call. In truth, those who worked Hollywood Hotel usually prospered. Their films became box office hits, their personal fame was enhanced, and all for an hour’s work. But many found it demeaning.”

— John Dunning

37. “Irene Rich had been a notable star of the silent screen in the 1920s, playing opposite Will Rogers, Dustin Farnum, and Wallace Beery. But a disagreement with Warner Brothers sent her into a new career – radio! By her own account, it was an inspiration: at “three o’clock in the morning I took a plane for New York, and the next day I presented myself at the National Broadcasting studios.” Irene Rich Dramas, which ran for more than a decade in various forms, was the result.”

— John Dunning

38. “An example of such was the story of three travelers who crash their car and are thrown back into prehistoric times. They encounter a Neanderthal man who doesn’t respond to reason and must be shot. “This is Oboler’s oblique approach to alerting the public that tyranny could only be dealt with by force of arms, not appeasement.”

— John Dunning

39. “The dates often lasted till early morning. Chaperones guided the winners home, leaving them only when they went their separate ways and the sponsor’s responsibility ended. But Cupid was not denied: at least half a dozen marriages and many “lively correspondences” came out of the show. And the idea worked on television as well. Blind Date ran on early ABC-TV, again with Francis as hostess, from 1949 through 1952.”

— John Dunning

40. “Chandu the Magician was among the first and last shows of its kind, in two distinct runs separated by 12 years of silence. Partners Raymond R. Morgan and Harry A. Earnshaw were brainstorming in 1931, looking for a new radio idea, when Earnshaw mentioned the public’s high interest in magic. They created Frank Chandler, who would fight the world’s evil forces with occult powers and a far-reaching crystal ball. Evil was personified in Roxor, a villain who dominated both runs.”

— John Dunning

41. “It resumed after the war. Corwin opened it Feb. 2, 1946, with Homecoming, a bittersweet slice of life about a GI who comes home to the farm.”

— John Dunning

42. “Then there was a major disruption with Errol Flynn, who arrived at rehearsal in the midst of a heated argument with his wife Lili Damita. The couple kept bickering through the reading until Woodruff erupted. “It was magnificent,” said Flynn’s costar, Olivia De Havilland, in Radio Mirror. “Never in all my life have I seen such wrath. I stood before my mirror night after night, trying to register anger like that.”

— John Dunning

43. “Among the guests who appeared on Information, Please were Ben Hecht, George S. Kaufman, Basil Rathbone, Dorothy Thompson, Lillian Gish, Alexander Woollcott, H. V. Kaltenborn, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Carl Sandburg, Albert Spalding, Boris Karloff, Marc Connelly, Dorothy Parker, Beatrice Lillie, and Postmaster General James Farley. Prizefighter Gene Tunney surprised the nation with his knowledge of Shakespeare. Moe Berg, Boston Red Sox catcher, had a.”

— John Dunning