Top 160 Circus Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Circus Quotes from famous people such as Ted Cassidy, Quique Setien, Claude Debussy, K. A. Applegate, Felicity Jones, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I turned down a part in 'Petticoat Junction.' They want

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.
Ted Cassidy
When you don’t win games everyone tries to stir the pot but this is the circus we’re in.
Quique Setien
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.
Claude Debussy
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.
K. A. Applegate
I learnt circus skills in drama group, so I can juggle.
Felicity Jones
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.
Jon Ossoff
Our family life is a circus without a net. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Ernie Johnson Jr.
In Roslyn, Pennsylvania, we started our real-life family circus. They provided the inspiration for my cartoons. I provided the perspiration.
Bil Keane
I remember I had a boyfriend a long time ago who said, ‘You need to change your name; you sound like a circus performer.’
Lucy Punch
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.
Lzzy Hale
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.
Mark McKinnon
I love animals, and I was always attracted to the idea of being a zoo veterinarian or a veterinarian with the circus.
Kay Redfield Jamison
So far as the colleges go, the sideshows are swallowing up the circus.
Woodrow Wilson
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.
Ryan Ross
I feel like I grew up in the circus. I know planes, trains and automobiles. And really talented, weird people.
Dakota Johnson
Keep the circus going inside you, keep it going, don’t take anything too seriously, it’ll all work out in the end.
David Niven
A circus is like a mother in whom one can confide and who rewards and punishes.
Burt Lancaster
I don’t want to end up being a circus act, doing my most famous tricks when I’m 70.
Pharrell Williams
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.
K. A. Applegate
When you’re in theater or the circus or film – to me it’s all one – affairs happen. People fall in love.
Baz Luhrmann
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.
Kevin Young
‘The Hobbit’s a big gig. It’s a huge circus that you become a part of.
Martin Freeman
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.
Philippe Petit
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.
Drew Barrymore
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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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.
Peter Milligan
As incredible as television has become, it often feels like a sideshow in what has become a daily three-ring media circus.
John Landgraf
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?
Nicholas Kristof
There is a circus around politics. But if you think it is a game, then you forget what the purpose of politics actually is.
Johann Lamont
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.
Terry Gilliam
I’m in the retail business, not the circus business.
Philip Green
The sun stands for energy and youth, which is what I th

The sun stands for energy and youth, which is what I thought the circus should be about.
Guy Laliberte
I think the national team is more like a traveling circus. It’s hard to get that translation into the NWSL teams.
Megan Rapinoe
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.
Kenny Baker
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
H. L. Mencken
How can you have a rock n’ roll circus without a midget?
Nikki Sixx
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.
Rajneesh
Nobody should try to play comedy unless they have a circus going on inside.
Ernst Lubitsch
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.
Paul Greengrass
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.
Erin Morgenstern
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.
Francis Lawrence
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.
Julie Burchill
When you go backstage at a Bruce Springsteen show, you don’t see a circus.
Clarence Clemons
I’m more girly but I also wanted to pull off the vintage, Hollywood glamour slightly circus style.
Bridget Marquardt
We’re like a travelling circus… We’re always on the go.
Camila Alves
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.
Philip Seymour Hoffman
The media circus surrounding Sports Direct… only proves that whatever progress Sports Direct makes, it will always be subject to disproportionate scrutiny and misrepresentation.
Mike Ashley
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.
Tiny Tim
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.
Peter Stormare
‘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.
Ry Cooder
Damn everything but the circus.
Corita Kent
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.
Charles Bukowski
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.
Bil Keane
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.
Toby Jones
Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.
George Carlin
I never got to see the circus… I was always in love with being a trapeze artist, though.
Keala Settle
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.
Seth Rollins
My solo show, ‘A Lot More Me,’ is part drag show, part burlesque show, part circus show, and part fashion show.
Violet Chachki
It would’ve been hard to do something else, to as it were, run away from the circus and become an accountant.
Samuel West
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.
Robert Lepage
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.
Pete Doherty
This circus games aspect has existed since the beginning of my career.
Placido Domingo
Chintu, Chimpoo, and I interacted with each other every

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!
Randhir Kapoor