Top 100 Johnny Carson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The Champagne they have stored is getting more valuable every year.”

— Johnny Carson

52. “In 1932, lame duck president Herbert Hoover was so desperate to remain in the White House that he dressed up as Eleanor Roosevelt. When FDR discovered the hoax in 1936, the two men decided to stay together for the sake of the children.”

— Johnny Carson

53. “There’s only one critic whose opinion I really value, in the final analysis: Johnny Carson. I have never needed any entourage standing around bolstering my ego. I’m secure. I know exactly who and what I am. I don’t need to be told. I make no apologies for being the way I am.”

— Johnny Carson

54. “In Hollywood if you don’t have a shrink, people think you’re crazy.”

— Johnny Carson

55. “From the time I was a little kid, I was always shy. Performing was when I was outgoing. So I guess I am a loner. I get claustrophobia if a lot of people are around.”

— Johnny Carson

56. “I hear that whenever someone in the White House tells a lie, Nixon gets a royalty.”

— Johnny Carson

57. “I get sick of that old rationalization, “We’re staying together because of the children.” Kids couldn’t be more miserable living with parents who can’t stand each other. They’re far better off if there’s an honest, clean divorce.”

— Johnny Carson

58. “Do you know my dream? I really want to become an aluminum-siding salesman.”

— Johnny Carson

59. “Happiness is seeing your son drafted the same day he’s been accepted to an expensive college.”

— Johnny Carson

60. “Happiness is discovering the prune juice your doctor ordered you to drink has fermented.”

— Johnny Carson

61. “Ronald Reagan just signed the new tax law. But I think he was in Hollywood too long. He signed it, ‘Best wishes, Ronald Reagan.’”

— Johnny Carson

62. “The closest thing to Roseanne Barr’s singing the national anthem was my cat being neutered.”

— Johnny Carson

63. “Pittsburgh is kind of like Newark without the cultural advantages.”

— Johnny Carson

64. “If life was fair, Elvis would still be alive and all the impersonators dead.”

— Johnny Carson

65. “For 3 days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow but the phone calls taper off.”

— Johnny Carson

66. “I am one of the lucky people in the world; I found something I always wanted to do, and I have enjoyed every single minute of it.”

— Johnny Carson

67. “There are very few Japanese Jews. As a result, there is no Japanese word for Alan King.”

— Johnny Carson

68. “I loved the towns I grew up in as a boy, and after I became a celebrity, I went back several times. I would have had the time of my life seeing the old places and the old faces again, but the attitude of those same people was, “I guess you’re so big we bore you now.””

— Johnny Carson

69. “They say atomic rad-i-ation can hurt your reproductive organs. My answer is, so can a hockey stick. But we don’t stop building them.”

— Johnny Carson

70. “Nancy Reagan fell down and broke her hair.”

— Johnny Carson

71. “Never use a big word when a little filthy one will do.”

— Johnny Carson

72. “Never ask your wife if she still hears from her old pimp.”

— Johnny Carson

73. “Your chances of getting hit by lighting go up if you stand under a tree, shake your fist at the sky, and say “Storms suck!!”

— Johnny Carson

74. “Believe me, you don’t walk away from the kind of money you make with a daily television show. You might get awful tired of it sometimes, but take a second look at the check and you get less tired right away.”

— Johnny Carson

75. “Did you know Richard Nixon is the only president whose formal portrait was painted by a police sketch artist?”

— Johnny Carson

76. “I can’t go anywhere without being bugged by somebody. I’d love to just hike out down the street, or drop in a restaurant, or wander in the park, or take my kids somewhere without collecting a trail of people. But I can’t.”

— Johnny Carson

77. “We have two kinds of air: regular and chunky style.”

— Johnny Carson

78. “We’re more effective than birth control pills.”

— Johnny Carson

79. “You become successful, the way I see it, only if you’re good enough to deliver what the public enjoys. If you’re not, you won’t have any audience; so the performer really has more to do with his success than the public does.”

— Johnny Carson

80. “Democracy is welcoming people from other lands, and giving them something to hold onto. Usually a mop or a leaf blower.”

— Johnny Carson

81. “Like their parents, kids flock to see James Bond and Derek Flint movies – outrageously antiheroic heroes who break all the taboos, making attractive the very things the kids are told they shouldn’t do themselves.”

— Johnny Carson

82. “I’m an entertainer; I try to give the public what it wants while I’m on the screen, and I’m completely sincere about it. If I don’t happen to be a laughing boy off the screen, that doesn’t make me a hypocrite or a phony.”

— Johnny Carson

83. “I have an ego like anybody else, but I don’t need to be stoked by going before the public all the time.”

— Johnny Carson

84. “I think students ought to have the right to protest, but not to the point of anarchy.”

— Johnny Carson

85. “George Burns has been on my show twenty or thirty times, or maybe more. How can you turn down a guy that age?”

— Johnny Carson

86. “Entertainment is like any other major industry; it’s cold, big business. The business end wants to know one thing: Can you do the job? If you can, you’re in, you’re made; if you can’t, you’re out.”

— Johnny Carson

87. “I never analyze it. Analyzing it would just be a waste of time. I just go out and do it.”

— Johnny Carson

88. “I think it’s almost immoral to keep on with a marriage that’s really bad. It just gets more and more rotten and vindictive and everybody gets more and more hurt. There’s not enough honesty about marriage, I think. I wish more people would face the truth about their marital situations.”

— Johnny Carson

89. “Find me any performer anywhere who isn’t egocentric. You’d better believe you’re good, or you’ve got no business being out there.”

— Johnny Carson

90. “As for being sociable, I hate the phoniness in the showbiz world. I know this will be taken wrong, but I don’t like clubs and organizations. I was never a joiner.”

— Johnny Carson

91. “People are hypocrites. If you ask them what they want to see on TV, they’ll tell you they want better quality programming. And then what do they watch? ‘Gilligan’s Island.’”

— Johnny Carson

92. “Who cares what entertainers on the air think about international affairs? Who would want to hear me about Vietnam? They can hear all they want from people with reason to be respected as knowledgeable.”

— Johnny Carson

93. “That would have been a great ticket, Reagan and Ford – an actor and a stuntman.”

— Johnny Carson

94. “The good news is that the president gets another chance. The bad news is that he’ll be two weeks older.”

— Johnny Carson

95. “How much of the national news that you report to the public each night consists of information you’ve actually gone out and dug up on your own?”

— Johnny Carson

96. “Democracy means free television, not good television, but free.”

— Johnny Carson

97. “I wouldn’t have the slightest interest in running for public office. I’d rather make jokes about politicians than become one of them.”

— Johnny Carson

98. “I feel the one sensible thing you can do is try to live in a way that pleases you. If you don’t hurt anybody else, what you do is your own business.”

— Johnny Carson

99. “I play my life straight – the way I see it. I’m grateful to audiences for watching me and for enjoying what I do – but I’m not one of those who believe that a successful entertainer is made by the public, as is so often said.”

— Johnny Carson

100. “Happiness is sitting down to watch some slides of your neighbor’s vacation and finding out that he spent two weeks in a nudist colony.”

— Johnny Carson