Mel Brooks Quotes

If presidents can't do it to their wives, they do it to their country.

Dark Helmet : So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb.

Hope for the best. Expect the worst. The world's a stage. We're unrehearsed. No way of knowing which way it's going. Take your chances, there are no answers. Hope for the best. Expect the worst.

Robin Hood: Watch my back!
Achoo: Yo' back just got punched twice.

Bialystock: How dare you condemn me without knowing all the facts!
Bloom: Mr Bialystock...
Bialystock: Shut up! I'm having a rhetorical conversation.You see this? This once held a pearl as big as your eye. Look at me now. Look at me now! I'm wearing a cardboard belt.

Feeling different, feeling alienated, feeling persecuted, feeling that the only way to deal with the world is to laugh - because if you don't laugh you're going to cry and never stop crying - that's probably what's responsible for the Jews having developed such a great sense of humor. The people who had the greatest reason to weep, learned more than anyone else how to laugh.

The movie may be slapstick, but it is not slapdash. It has been conceived and completed as a coherent whole, done in luminously perfect black and white. Everything, most particularly the music, is poignantly faithful to the spirit of old times…. There are Vaudeville jokes that may well be older than Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley herself…but they are spaced along a carefully developed story line which is executed by a team of hugely talented comic actors rather than one-lining comics.

Igor (limping off): Walk this way — and Dr. Frankenstein limps off after him.

Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.

I got it! I got it! I got it!…I ain’t got it.

Will Scarlet Blinkin, fix your boobs, you look like a bleeding Picasso.

Who's the dummy writing this show?!

Railway Worker: You shifty nigger! They said you was hung!
Sheriff Bart : And they was right!

Count de Monet: [consistently mispronounced as "count da money"] Bearnaise?
Bernaise: Yes?
Count de Monet: Do we have any of those delicious raisins left?
Bearnaise: You ate yours. These are mine.
Count de Monet: Au contraire, they are mine! I paid for them! Hand them over!
Bearnaise: [gives the bag of raisins to the Count, sotto voce, mimicking] 'Au contraire, I paid for them! They're mine!' [blows a raspberry]
Count de Monet: Don't be saucy with me, Bearnaise!
Bernaise: [mouths] Bitch.

In every classic comedy duo, from Laurel and Hardy to Abbott and Costello to Martin and Lewis, in order for the exchange to work, the quality of the straight man had to be as dynamic as that of the funny guy. Carl was the best at this. I could use a single question as a springboard to unplanned exposition and tangents that would be as much of a surprise to Carl as they were to the audience. Carl was a gifted partner: While he deferred the punch lines to me, he knew me well enough to follow along and cross paths enough to set me up for more opportunities. He also knew he could throw me a complete curveball and I’d swing for the fences. We were a great ad-libbed high-wire act, and like the best high-wire acts, ours was dependent upon complete trust and respect for each other. Carl once said, “A brilliant mind in panic is a wonderful thing to behold.