When challenged why he had written so little, he fired back: "Moses wrote one book. Then what did he do?" - Sidney Morgenbesser

A proposed response to Heidegger's ontological query "Why is there something rather than nothing?" – "And if there were nothing? You'd still be complaining!"

During a lecture, the Oxford linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin made the claim that although a in English implies a positive meaning, there is no language in which a double positive implies a negative. Morgenbesser responded in a dismissive tone, "Yeah, yeah."

When asked his opinion of pragmatism, Morgenbesser replied "It's all very well in theory but it doesn't work in practice."