Pity? You don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair? Stay in your house!

People hate me because I am a multifaceted, talented, wealthy, internationally famous genius.

I get paid for what most kids get punished for.

Pity? You don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair? Stay in your house!

I've had great success being a total idiot.

I am probably the most selfish man you will ever meet in your life. No one gets the satisfaction or the joy that I get out of seeing kids realize there is hope.

A woman doing comedy doesn't offend me, but sets me back a bit. I, as a viewer, have trouble with it. I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies in the world.

When I was onstage doing the work, adrenaline killed the pain because I never hurt in front of an audience.

Every man's dream is to be able to sink into the arms of a woman without also falling into her hands.

We're leaving the House to people who either were born with a silver spoon in their mouth... or couldn't get better jobs in the first place.

A lot of people resent that I've been in someone's life for 50 years. Why shouldn't people have an affection for me and what I've done? Didn't I have to be genuine for them to buy into what I did? There are children who grow up today who will not have that when they're 55 years old. With whom will they have it? Name an example for me.

Adrenaline is wonderful. It covers pain. It covers dementia. It covers everything.

Don't you understand how dramatic it is to be a comic? To be a fool, to get people to laugh at this show-off? Milton Berle could take Laurence Olivier and stick him under the table if he wanted to. And so could I.

From 1936 on, I have taken more falls than any other 20 comedians put together. From the time I was 21, I've taken them on everything from clay courts to cement to wood floors, coming off pianos, going out a two-story window, landing on Dean, falling into the rough. You do that and you're gonna have problems.

Gambling is part of the human condition. I love it. I have the best time gambling. I've been winning fortunes, and I've been losing them.

I don't want to be remembered. I want the nice words when I can hear them.

I have a loyalty that runs in my bloodstream, when I lock into someone or something, you can't get me away from it because I commit that thoroughly. That's in friendship, that's a deal, that's a commitment. Don't give me paper - I can get the same lawyer who drew it up to break it. But if you shake my hand, that's for life.

I have some very personal feelings about politics, but I don't get into it because I do comedy already.

I need the applause.

I never got a formal education. So my intellect is my common sense. I don't have anything else going for me. And my common sense opens the door to instinct.

I tell young comics, 'Do you want this badly enough? It's there. But you have to go get it. And if you think I'm going to give you the key to the lock of that door, there is no key, there is no lock, and there is no door.'

I turned down 'Some Like It Hot.' See how smart I am? I felt I couldn't bring anything funny to it. The outfit was funny. I don't need to compete with the wardrobe.

If I found the cure for dystrophy tomorrow, I would do a telethon in four weeks for acute pain that in this country is a bigger problem than cancer, heart, sickle cell, anemia, name it. It is - it's hitting 70 million Americans.

Postwar America was a very buttoned-up nation. Radio shows were run by censors, Presidents wore hats, ladies wore girdles. We came straight out of the blue - nobody was expecting anything like Martin and Lewis. A sexy guy and a monkey is how some people saw us.

The young man who's had the Guggenheim fortune behind him all his life - he can hire all the authorities on the subject to teach him how to do a monologue, but he's never going to have the right stuff to pull it off. If he doesn't walk out onstage needing to walk out there, he doesn't have a dream of doing well.

When I hit around 65, 66, I started to feel tremendous worth and incredible personal esteem. I was becoming very cognisant of my contribution to the American spirit of helping your fellow man and all of the good stuff.

When I would be myself, I was being big-headed. I was being egotistical. I was a megalomaniac, when it really was just having not to be a monkey for a few hours a day. And fulfilling the need to be a man.

When I was a kid I said to my father one afternoon Daddy will you take me to the zoo He answered If the zoo wants you let them come and get you.

Commercial television has underestimated the intelligence of the public.

I just had to plod along without having any teaching, which was a pity.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.

What a pity human beings can't exchange problems. Everyone knows exactly how to solve the other fellow's.

It is a pity that instead of the Pilgrim Fathers landing on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock had not landed on the Pilgrim Fathers.

It's a pity that I can never really enjoy my movies because, after the mixing, your capacity as a spectator just disappears. I have to think about what I felt just before the mixing.

Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.

Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.

As a boy I used to go to the Chamber of Horrors at the annual fair, to look at the wax figures of Emperors and Kings, of heroes and murderers of the day. The dead now had that same unreality, which shocks without arousing pity.

Pity? You don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair? Stay in your house!

I never knew whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses.

A mixture of admiration and pity is one of the surest recipes for affection.

It's a mistake to confuse pity with love.

To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most.

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

Pity speaks to grief More sweetly than a band of instruments.

We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker of course and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. For God's sake, look after our people.