Steve Allen Quotes

Asthma doesn't seem to bother me any more unless I'm around cigars or dogs. The thing that would bother me most would be a dog smoking a cigar.

One of the nice things about problems is that a good many of them do not exist except in our imaginations.

Ours is a government of checks and balances. The Mafia and crooked businessmen make out checks, and the politicians and other compromised officials improve their bank balances.

One social evil for which the New Testament is clearly in part responsible is anti-Semitism.

Thousands of years ago only Christ could walk on the water. Today anybody can do it; you just step on the garbage.

Totalitarianism is patriotism institutionalized.

In a rational society we would want our presidents to be teachers. In our actual society we insist they be cheerleaders.

Radio is the theater of the mind; television is the theater of the mindless.

Ideas have consequences, and totally erroneous ideas are likely to have destructive consequences.

If the Old Testament were a reliable guide in the matter of capital punishment, half the people in the United States would have to be killed tomorrow.

Millions of Germans had absolute faith in Hitler. Millions of Russians had faith in Stalin. Millions of Chinese had faith in Mao. Billions have had faith in imaginary gods.

There is scarcely a page of the Bible on which an open mind does not perceive a contradiction, an unlikely story, an obvious error, an historical impossibility of one sort or another.

Nothing is better than the unintended humor of reality.

Civilization itself . . . can easily be swept aside when mob passions are aroused.

...we are entitled to make almost any reasonable assumption, but should resist making conclusions until evidence requires that we do so.

Humor is a social lubricant that helps us get over some of the bad spots.

There are few pages of history which do not demonstrate that public prayer and ritual never inoculated people against mass-madness and cruelty. What is needed is emphasis on morality and manners.

God is by definition the holder of all possible knowledge, it would be impossible for him to have faith in anything. Faith, then, is built upon ignorance and hope.

If there is a God, the phrase that must disgust him is - holy war.

This is The Tonight Show. I can't tell you too much about it, other than the fact that this program is going to go on forever.

Just as with cars, it's critical to know the fuel efficiency of black holes.

Everybody is somewhere.

Physical fitness is in. I recently had a physical fit myself.

We must never forget that both good and evil flow from the Bible. It is therefore not above criticism.

Dark energy is perhaps the biggest mystery in physics.

If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.