Top 160 Circus Quotes

I turned down a part in ‘Petticoat Junction.’ They wanted me to play a circus giant. I didn’t want to take that step into type casting. I don’t want to play freaks and science-fiction monsters.

When you don’t win games everyone tries to stir the pot but this is the circus we’re in.

The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen.

At the end of the day, I’d love to see children stop begging their parents to go to the circus. That’s what would make me most happy.

I learnt circus skills in drama group, so I can juggle.

There’s a coalition of folks here in Georgia who want representation that’s focused on local economic development and on accountability and not on the partisan circus in Washington.

Our family life is a circus without a net. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

In Roslyn, Pennsylvania, we started our real-life family circus. They provided the inspiration for my cartoons. I provided the perspiration.

I remember I had a boyfriend a long time ago who said, ‘You need to change your name; you sound like a circus performer.’

I think that’s a big part of what I love about the boys in the band, too, and what I find attractive in men in general is, really, the ability to not take everything so seriously because it is rock n’ roll after all; it’s a freakin’ circus. We’re not accountants here.

Presidential primary debates are an important part of our political process. But the media has wrested complete control from the parties and candidates over everything, including the number, the format, the qualifications, and the moderators. And they’ve become a circus.

I love animals, and I was always attracted to the idea of being a zoo veterinarian or a veterinarian with the circus.

So far as the colleges go, the sideshows are swallowing up the circus.

We wanted to grow, and we were really over the circus theme at that point. We went out in the woods and got new clothes and all grew beards.

I feel like I grew up in the circus. I know planes, trains and automobiles. And really talented, weird people.

Keep the circus going inside you, keep it going, don’t take anything too seriously, it’ll all work out in the end.

A circus is like a mother in whom one can confide and who rewards and punishes.

I don’t want to end up being a circus act, doing my most famous tricks when I’m 70.

When I was a child, going to a circus with wild animal acts was a rite of passage. These days, it’s an act of complicit cruelty.

When you’re in theater or the circus or film – to me it’s all one – affairs happen. People fall in love.

I think Barnum is at the center of American culture. He’s helping to invent what we now think of as pop culture. He invented pretty much our notions of the circus.

‘The Hobbit’s a big gig. It’s a huge circus that you become a part of.

If I had been born in the circus, my parents would have pushed me on that little high wire at four years old. That’s when the body is most limber to learn those acrobatics.

Going back to Georgiana Drew and John Drew, and my great-grandfather Maurice Barrymore, and it was such a sort of circus of odd, interesting people that loved acting.

The students that, like the wild animal being prepared for its tricks in the circus called ‘life’, expects only training as sketched above, will be severely disappointed: by his standards he will learn next to nothing.

With ‘Hollow Circus,’ I used a family story that haunted me as a kid, one of those anecdotes about a family member that would rarely be spoken of in front of the children.

As incredible as television has become, it often feels like a sideshow in what has become a daily three-ring media circus.

If I wanted a circus ringmaster, I’d hire Trump. If I wanted advice on brain surgery or hospital management, I’d turn to Carson. Fiorina would make an articulate television pundit. But for president?

There is a circus around politics. But if you think it is a game, then you forget what the purpose of politics actually is.

John Cleese was with a group called Cambridge Circus, who had come to New York, and we became friends. Years later that produced a certain team effort.

I’m in the retail business, not the circus business.

The sun stands for energy and youth, which is what I thought the circus should be about.

I think the national team is more like a traveling circus. It’s hard to get that translation into the NWSL teams.

I started performing in 1950 at the age of 16 when I joined the Burton Lester’s Midgets as a performer. Shortly after, I became a DJ with Mecca Organization before joining Billy Smart’s Circus as a clown and shadow Ringmaster.

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

How can you have a rock n’ roll circus without a midget?

My people. I have given them a sense of individuality, integrity. I have not made them slaves of any god or any religion. Nor of any holy book or any priest. I have certainly not replaced their god. They are all a part of what I call my traveling circus.

Nobody should try to play comedy unless they have a circus going on inside.

It’s a circus life, the movies. It’s a lot of travelling, a lot of antisocial hours; there’s a lot of it that’s about escaping from life.

I’m actually not a huge circus fan in the traditional sense, but I like a lot of the circus trappings of striped tents and caramel. I lean more towards Cirque du Soleil than Barnum and Bailey.

I think the movie business and film crews are a little bit like the circus, in that we travel around like a pack and we’re a big family for a finite period of time. We roll into someplace, cause a bunch of damage, and then roll out.

The money I pay for my cultural experiences came willingly from my own pocket – they were not the result of bread being removed from the mouths of the poor so that Miss Thing here could mince off to the circus smelling of roses.

When you go backstage at a Bruce Springsteen show, you don’t see a circus.

I’m more girly but I also wanted to pull off the vintage, Hollywood glamour slightly circus style.

We’re like a travelling circus… We’re always on the go.

You know the circus performer who spins the plates in the air you know, and he’ll spin six or seven plates in the air? Acting sometimes is kind of that guy spinning all those plates in the air but in your head and in your body.

The media circus surrounding Sports Direct… only proves that whatever progress Sports Direct makes, it will always be subject to disproportionate scrutiny and misrepresentation.

I’m the first has-been star singer ever to sing with the circus. I mean, Presley sang with the circus, but that was before he became a star.

I like the clowns from the circus that have more paint on their face. They were all funny and made me laugh. As a kid, I remember the clowns that were all in white reminded me more of death than circus clowns. It can be a scary thing.

‘Geronimo’ was a huge amount of work. That involved 80-piece orchestras and Indians and Tuvans and all kinds of crazy people on that thing. That’s a real circus, that score.

Damn everything but the circus.

We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

Many of the network television shows have done takeoffs on ‘Family Circus,’ including ‘David Letterman,’ ‘Friends,’ ‘Roseanne,’ and others, and, in my estimation the use of them is a compliment to the popularity of the feature, which just by mentioning it’s name sets up the image of a warm, loving family-type feature.

But I think the children of actors share a certain pragmatic approach. One is denied some of that ‘running away with the circus’ element of being an actor.

Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.

I never got to see the circus… I was always in love with being a trapeze artist, though.

Sometimes, if you go to the same gyms, the fans catch on to that, and they start hanging out at the gyms. It becomes a little bit of a circus.

My solo show, ‘A Lot More Me,’ is part drag show, part burlesque show, part circus show, and part fashion show.

It would’ve been hard to do something else, to as it were, run away from the circus and become an accountant.

The great advantage of the circus, and the reason it is so popular, is really the ideal combination of art and sport. It’s the ideal art form, in a certain way, if you want to be accessible.

The media circus got a bit twisted when I was in London. It became a bit of a joke, really. In Paris, they’re so serious, I can take myself really seriously, too. I can get really morbid without people telling me to cheer up.

This circus games aspect has existed since the beginning of my career.

Chintu, Chimpoo, and I interacted with each other every day. Chimpoo lived with me and Chintu either came to the office on the days that he wasn’t shooting or spoke to me on the phone. We didn’t need anybody when we three were together. We were a very happy circus by ourselves. We were a robust crowd!

I think that my vampires in general were influenced by my being allowed to watch the Hammer vampire films. Vampire Circus, also shown as Circus of Fear, was one of those movies.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

In the Stephen Sondheim song, when something bad happens in the circus, they send in the clowns. In America’s political circus, they send in the lawyers.

My first tour I did was The Warped Tour, and I was likening myself to the bearded lady at the circus because not only was I an actor touring, doing rock n’ roll, but I was also a female front person making really muscular, male-dominated rock music.

Fame hasn’t really affected me. I have a really close knit group around me, and my sister is always with me, so it’s like a bit of a travelling circus.

When you see the numbers who come to the circus, you understand that we don’t get that by abusing animals.

In the Stephen Sondheim song, when something bad happens in the circus, they send in the clowns. In America’s political circus, they send in the lawyers.

Living as an actor is rather like living life on the trapezes in a circus. Every time you jump on, you have to pray that, when the time comes for you to jump off, there is another trapeze swinging your way.

We didn’t reinvent the circus. We repackaged it in a much more modern way.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a clown. I didn’t want to be an actor, I wanted to join the circus and entertain people.

The circus was born with animals, horses at the start. This is part of our cultural heritage. It’s a whole, with clowns and acrobats.

You realize that for all the shenanigans that go on in the big circus of politics, everybody wakes up and goes to work.

I think if you’re able to make the music you want and you can do it in the right kind of context, you don’t have to be a circus ringleader to be successful.

So we see Edward as a young man on the road and he meets a giant and he brings the giant to a circus where he meets a Miss Calloway. He sees the woman of his dreams and I am the only one who knows who she is.

It’s always fun catching up with the other players because so many of them were really good mates when I was playing on the main tour. The thing you miss when you give up is that camaraderie that you experienced because, for 35 weeks of the year, it really is a travelling circus.

At any moment, one company stands in the spotlight of the middle ring in the stock market’s never-ending circus. It may not be the biggest corporation in the world, or the most profitable, but somehow it both mirrors and leads the market’s broader action.

Someone like Raj Kapoor is born once in 100 years. He was a one-man circus all by himself.

My job is to make the case that I’ll do the best job possible representing the people of Georgia’s Sixth District, and what they want is representation that’s focused on them and not this national partisan political circus.

I resisted the film business as long as I could, because of the big circus act and the amount of money that it costs to make films – I saw my father suffer through that.

For better or worse, I have a lot of vaudeville circus skills that you just can’t showcase in Aaron Sorkin’s work.

Being an actor is pretty much like being in the circus.

I’m certainly a real homebody. But the truth is that I understand that desire to, in a way, go join the circus. That’s what got me out of Long Island and into show business. I was like, ‘I’m just going to have an adventure. I want to be a person that isn’t surrounded by their mail and their cat.’

Circus is the magic you should show your children.

I’m a street photographer, but I’m interested in any ironic, whimsical images, and there’s something very romantic about a circus.

I don’t believe in preachy films. I don’t like such films. Having said that, I don’t even enjoy films that only ‘entertain.’ That way, even the circus entertains.

You name it, I’ve done it: circus, Chautauqua, variety, movies, stage, radio, TV, personal appearances.

The circus allows one to be logical and unreal at the same time. In the circus, all is possible: there can be a man with two heads or a character with a green face.

When I first became involved with PETA, it was on an ‘issue-by-issue’ basis – they interviewed me in my old apartment about animal abuse in the circus as I sat on a leather sofa.

I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve been in theater, films, television, radio, tragedy, comedy, farce – I’ve been in a musical and in music halls, in pantomime. I was once ringmaster in a circus.

What do we lose without wild animal acts at the circus? Absolutely nothing, except the opportunity to be haunted and heartbroken.

I haven’t had a stationary home since going with the circus, but since my parents lived in Lafayette about 25 years ago and my sister lives here now, I always claim it as home.

Going back to Georgiana Drew and John Drew, and my great-grandfather Maurice Barrymore, and it was such a sort of circus of odd, interesting people that loved acting.

Pittsburgh felt like the perfect size of a city to me. There’s enough to do, but it’s not like living in a circus. I also really loved how sports-enthusiastic Pittsburgh people are: how proud of their sports they are.

There’s an old saying in football – the circus doesn’t stay in town forever. The older you get, the more you realize there’s a deeper meaning. It’s better to leave 3 hours too soon than a minute too late.

I grew up on movie sets, I’m comfortable on sets. A movie set is like a circus. I don’t understand why moviemaking has to be such an insane environment.

I dress well. I travel; I seem to be relatively glamorous for a film guy – which, to me, is like being the fastest midget in the circus.

By the time ‘Dumbo’s Circus’ wrapped production of its 120 episodes, I had an agent, and I had scored my first feature film gig.

My house is basically a trailer. I live a circus lifestyle. I’m always moving. It’s not always easy for people that live with me, but that’s the path I chose.

There’ll probably be moments in my life where it seems that people will want to camp out on my doorstep, and moments when no one wants to hire me and couldn’t be less interested. I’ve been around the circus, and it’ll come and go.

I thought a circus environment would be an interesting venue to explore, where you didn’t just have one tent with three rings and a show going on but where you could explore different things in different tents.

When I did finally get to the circus as an adult, I was very impressed by the trapeze artist. But, being 6 feet 3 inches and over 200 pounds, there was no way I could do a trapeze act. If I fell I’d take the catcher with me.

Clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung.

I started out doing multiple characters from day one, when I got my fist job in ‘Dumbo’s Circus.’ I’m used to getting in an argument with myself, throwing myself off a cliff, patching myself up and brushing myself off with an arm around my shoulder.

It’s weird: making a movie is like life compacted into three months. You have these very intense relationships with people, and you talk to them every day – your editor, the casting people, music people, your actors – then it ends. It’s like a circus life.

The Premier League is a circus, it’s constantly changing. It’s full of emotion, ups and downs, unpredictability and this makes it the spectacle that it is.

Liturgy and worship were never meant to be confined to the cathedrals and sanctuaries. Liturgy at its best can be performed like a circus or theater – making the Gospel visible as a witness to the world around us.

When I was 18 I worked with the Ringling Brothers circus, taking care of menagerie animals. I used to rather deliberately risk my life with the big cats.

I don’t get to do a lot of fight scenes on ‘Sanctuary,’ but I’m a trained fighter; I’ve been doing martial arts for years and, you know, I’m very active physically; I used to be a circus performer.

I will always remember this summer day in Paris, when I was to perform a great acrobatic move. I can still see myself stepping on the ring of a packed circus along real performers.

I want to be a traveling circus in that big-league uniform, like everybody else.

There are certainly times when baseball is much more than bread and circus, times when baseball resonates deeply and meaningfully with many, many people, and times when a game that is built around overcoming failure can teach us all a few important lessons.

What happened was, my parents after ‘Circus Boy’ decided to take me out of show business for two years to go back to normal school. It was the smartest thing they ever did.

If you want to be anonymous, you can go to Soho or Camden, and it’s not a problem. There are a lot of Spanish people. If you go to Piccadilly or Oxford Circus, you hear lots of Spanish voices, but I’m not recognised much.

I don’t have a circus around me, and that’s a choice. I like to be on Planet Earth as much as possible.

Forty years ago, the players were like a travelling circus – we went everywhere together and were pretty good friends.

Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.

I’ve had 79 to 80 years of show business. I started when I was 5 with a man called Tom Mix. I didn’t have time to go to school because I was in silent movies, I was in radio, I was in burlesque, I worked with the circus. I’m all show business!

My first band was called Nubert Circus, a very embarrassing, dumb name. It means nothing. We were kind of grunge. I would say we were more funny punk, a lot of songs about food and stuff like that.

The circus is a global theme. It exists in all parts of the world – maybe not in Africa, but it exists in Asia in all parts. In Latin America, it’s difficult to find a person who hasn’t gone to the circus.

I started acting in second grade – my first role was in the Thanksgiving play. I was the Indian chasing the turkey. All the other mom’s encouraged my mom to get me into acting after that. Also, when I saw ‘The Sound of Music’ at Music Circus, I knew I wanted to act.

I did a cake for the 60th birthday of Elton John, for Britney Spears’ 27th birthday and for the ‘Circus’ album she put out – the cake had circus themes. I prepared a cake for a surprise 82nd birthday event for the architect Frank Gehry; the cake was comprised of mini-replicas of his buildings.

I welcome newcomers to cons, or ‘con-virgins’ as I like to call them, by saying ‘Welcome to the ‘Supernatural’ Circus,’ and I mean it. We take pride as a cast to deliver a show that not only entertains the fans but ourselves, Creation Entertainment, and everyone involved on both sides.

Rock ‘n’ roll is like a circus today.

Circus lions are mean. They don’t know anything about affection training.

I enjoy being a hyphenate. I’ve always thought of my career as a plate spinner in the circus.

Cyclists are insane. You’re going through the Alps, climbing up mountains. There’s this circus around them. They’re so tough. When they have a day off, they go out and cycle 100 miles.

From 1840 to 1940, the circus was the biggest form of entertainment in the country. People were starting to have money, starting to have half a Saturday off. In an era before people went on vacations much, the big deal was when the circus came through town.

Next to a circus there ain’t nothing that packs up and tears out faster than the Christmas spirit.

Animals are the traditional circus. It’s what people remember from their childhood.

When I first started dating my husband, I had this weird fascination with the circus and clowns and old carnival things and sideshow freaks and all that. About a month after we started dating, he bought me this amazing black-and-white photo book on the circus in the 1930s, and I started sobbing.

After touring an album, you have this strange void that follows it, where you feel slightly displaced, like you’ve just finished with the circus and you’ve got to find a new job. You think, OK, what shall we do next.

I’ve worked behind counters serving food, and I’ve lived on the circus train, and I’ve led bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and Russia. I’ve been a key liner for a newspaper, I’ve done typesetting. Oh, all sorts of things.

I love Oxford Circus, so I can do Primarni, and I can do River Island and Topshop and Selfridges.

Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.

In 1969, when I was still living in London, I had gone with some friends to see ‘Easy Rider’ in a movie theater in Piccadilly Circus and had returned alone some days later to see it again. It was Jack’s combination of ease and exuberance that had captured me from the moment he had come on-screen.

I’ve said it from the very beginning: Fighting the best guys in the world doesn’t pay as good as the circus. I want to join the circus. I’m trying to get that circus money.

You ask people, ‘What is the circus?’ They’ll say, ‘Animals, clowns and acrobats!’ That’s what people want. If you say you don’t have animals, they walk away.

One can do a film and not work for six months, but on TV, you have to produce good content every week. It involves a lot of hard work, as one has to fight for ratings every week. But I have always got love from the audiences, be it during ‘The Great Laughter Challenge’ or ‘Comedy Circus.’

There are always those ‘Gossip Girl’ walk-and-talk scenes where you’re walking and just talking about life and death. You’re having a serious conversation, looking someone in the eye, but everywhere around you, it’s literally a circus.

Motherhood has relaxed me in many ways. You learn to deal with crisis. I’ve become a juggler, I suppose. It’s all a big circus, and nobody who knows me believes I can manage, but sometimes I do.

I don’t think the media circus has ever been a shock to my life seeing as I was with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor when I was 17.

I can be going through nothing, but within me, in my head, oh my God! It can be a circus.

Sometimes I think God wants there to be a circus so we can show there’s another way to respond.

When I wasn’t wrestling, I was always at the circus or at a show watching all these people – ‘how do they make their stuff work for their audience?’ That used to fascinate me as a child.

I’m shocked to be saying this, but as a child, I never went to a circus. It cost too much.

In the 20th century alone, there have been 1,600 books about the circus. My adding one more would be superfluous unless I do something totally new and different.

Circus with animal shows should be forbidden, there are enough other thrilling options.

When you do a ‘messa di voce,’ that means you start soft, you crescendo into loud – and then you go back to soft again. Some people call it circus tricks, but in bel canto, it’s really written into the music.

I ran away from three different boarding schools before joining a circus school, and eventually I became an actor. The only thing I learned at boarding school was never to send my child to one.

We took up the offer with the BBC, and that was Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I didn’t have to submit my ideas to the group. I used to turn up on the days we recorded with a can of film under my arm, and in it went.

There was a TV special every year called ‘Circus of the Stars,’ and I did three consecutive ones – one as a juggler, one as a high-wire performer, and one as a high hand balance.

Learning to read, for the brain, is a lot like an amateur ringmaster first learning how to organise a three-ring circus. He wants to begin individually and then synchronise all the performances. It only happens after all the separate acts are learned and practised long and well.

Trump’s 2016 effort could afford to be a shambolic circus; nothing was on the line. He never expected to win and so the rotating cast of campaign managers didn’t really matter.

As a kid, the theatre always felt a bit like running away to join the circus.

Improv Olympics, Second City are some of the most tolerant, accepting people. They’re like circus folk. They’re freaks themselves.

I remember in the circus learning that the clown was the prince, the high prince. I always thought that the high prince was the lion or the magician, but the clown is the most important.

I’ve been a tough sailor, a foppish-type landscape gardener, a French villain, a circus strongman.