Top 90 Lily Tomlin Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “To me, “sexual freedom” means freedom from having to have sex.”

— Lily Tomlin

52. “Remember we’re all in this alone.”

— Lily Tomlin

53. “You can’t expect insights, even the big ones, to make you suddenly understand everything. But I figure: Hey it’s a step in the right direction if they leave you confused in a deeper way.”

— Lily Tomlin

54. “When we speak to God, we call it prayer; when God speaks back, we call it psychosis!”

— Lily Tomlin

55. “I still believe that sex is dirty. It’s just that now I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

— Lily Tomlin

56. “Wouldn’t it be great if we all grew up to be what we wanted to be? The world would be full of nurses, firemen, and ballerinas.”

— Lily Tomlin

57. “Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination.”

— Lily Tomlin

58. “Being a New Yorker is never having to say you are sorry.”

— Lily Tomlin

59. “There’s so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic.”

— Lily Tomlin

60. “I wonder what it would be like if we all became what we wanted to be when we grew up? I mean, imagine a world filled with nothing but firemen, cowboys, nurses and ballerinas.”

— Lily Tomlin

61. “9 to 5 made people aware of equal pay for equal work. It hasn’t really happened, but it has come closer.”

— Lily Tomlin

62. “The formula for water is H2O. Is the formula for an ice cube H2O squared?”

— Lily Tomlin

63. “I especially love ‘Web Therapy’ and I did ‘Eastbound and Down’ too. I had a lot of fun doing that.”

— Lily Tomlin

64. “If you have a dog or a cat, you know how developed they can be. How sensitive, how aware. They suffer. We all do.”

— Lily Tomlin

65. “We’re giving jobs to people who would otherwise be out of work if we weren’t exploiting cheap labor.”

— Lily Tomlin

66. “I worry about kids today – because of the sexual revolution, they’re going to grow up and never know what “dirty” means.”

— Lily Tomlin

67. “If evolution was worth its salt, it should’ve evolved something better than ‘survival of the fittest.’ I think a better idea would be ‘survival of the wittiest.’ At least, that way, creatures that didn’t survive could’ve died laughing.”

— Lily Tomlin

68. “If life is so meaningless, then why are we always bringing it up?”

— Lily Tomlin

69. “My politics are just inclined to be empathetic and humanistic. I grew up with so many different kinds of people with different politics, different religion, no religion, no politics, education, no education, and I was infatuated with all of them.”

— Lily Tomlin

70. “Thank God kids never mean well.”

— Lily Tomlin

71. “I was always empathetic with animals. It’s a terrible and self-involved point of view that we do something because someone else is exploitable.”

— Lily Tomlin

72. “And yet humanity is so not evolved that how can you expect anything absolutely major to happen? Look how long, we move ahead in technology, how much do we move ahead in morality or emotion? We move ahead so minimally, minimally, minimally.”

— Lily Tomlin

73. “It’s a more ridiculing, divisive humor today.”

— Lily Tomlin

74. “The phone company handles 84 billion calls a year-everything from kings, queens, and presidents to the scum of the earth.”

— Lily Tomlin

75. “Did you know, throughout the cosmos they found intelligent life forms that play to play? We are the only ones that play to win. Explains why we have more than our share of losers.”

— Lily Tomlin

76. “But there are too many people that make so much money at the cost of lives of other humans and for no reason but to make the money.”

— Lily Tomlin

77. “People hire me to create some kind of archetype or some culture type, or something. I guess they accept whatever I come up with.”

— Lily Tomlin

78. “Having a real public outlet is how you imprint something for yourself. It’s just a matter of timing. It’s like you’ve marked your territory.”

— Lily Tomlin

79. “The whole idea of being in captivity in such limited space, especially in a zoo, causes elephants to suffer. They develop all kinds of foot diseases. They die. They get cysts. Not only is it painful, it eventually kills them.”

— Lily Tomlin

80. “I was always drawn to more the social-expression-of-culture types.”

— Lily Tomlin

81. “I mean yes to act out something or take chances in the performance is one thing. But in terms of a camera, whatever’s captured is captured so that’s a little more daunting.”

— Lily Tomlin

82. “I guess that’s one of the reasons that you do it – work all the time – because it’s sort of a high to find something that really works.”

— Lily Tomlin

83. “Creating characters is just another way to express a type and put that type to use.”

— Lily Tomlin

84. “I feel some part of me can wake up and be very existential and the next day wake up and be sort of in love with the universe.”

— Lily Tomlin

85. “Exercise is for people who can’t handle drugs or alcohol.”

— Lily Tomlin

86. “If you can’t be direct, why be?”

— Lily Tomlin

87. “I bought a box of animal crackers, but there was nothing inside. They’d eaten each other.”

— Lily Tomlin

88. “I guess if people couldn’t profit from war I don’t think there would be war.”

— Lily Tomlin

89. “Why isn’t there a special name for the tops of your feet?”

— Lily Tomlin

90. “No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.”

— Lily Tomlin

91. “I wanted to be a stage actress. I wanted to be a New York actress and have a community with other actors. I didn’t want to get famous; I always thought getting famous was a drag on you.”

— Lily Tomlin

92. “The larger picture is really to swing people’s awareness of what really is moral.”

— Lily Tomlin

93. “I always wanted to be something, but now I see I should have been more specific.”

— Lily Tomlin

94. “Even when you win the rat race, you’re still a rat .”

— Lily Tomlin

95. “So if you’ve had a good time tonight, or if you’ve had a good time any night, for gosh sake’s why not drop a dollar in the mail to me?”

— Lily Tomlin