Top 55 Orson Bean Quotes

A lot of people didn’t know I was doing Broadway. They thought I was one of those guys who was famous for being famous. I was the one who sat next to Charles Nelson Reilly and said funny things.

The reason I became a Christian is the same reason I became a conservative: I paid attention.

I grew up on Harvard Square and I watched 50-year old men walking around with green book bags slung over their shoulders going for their fourth PhD, never having left the world of academia to alleged reality.

Most municipalities grow up around commerce; there’s a harbor, or the train stops there. Venice, CA was founded for fun.

TV and film are always slipping in political messages, not ones designed to bring us together but to divide us.

One night in a club in Boston, I tried the name Roger Duck. No laughs. The next night, I tried Orson Bean, putting together a pompous first name and a silly second name. I got laughs, so I decided to keep it.

San Francisco is a city; L.A. is a collection of suburbs that have very little in common with one another.

I didn’t want to be famous for its own sake. I wanted to be famous so as to be happy.

I didn’t use a voice change to do Bilbo. I have a distinctive voice anyway. I did an attitude change, making Bilbo kind of fussy – fussy and proper – then gradually dropped the fussiness and properness as the madness of battle really affects him.

I felt only a conservative president could bring peace in Vietnam ’cause he wouldn’t be accused of being soft on communism.

Each morning and night I get down on my knees and thank God for my life and ask Him to make me grateful all the time instead of just most of the time.

Hollywood is very divisive.

I make more than a handsome living doing voices for commercials; I hear myself all day on the tube.

Part of me is nonhuman and eccentric, which is what a hobbit is, and I don’t mind being eccentric.

In the long period of time when I did talk shows and game shows, a whole new generation of people came along who thought of me as that, and not as a theater person.

I did my teen-age years in World War II. War news was a constant. We kept the radio on in our house to hear Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from the rooftops of London, describing the blitz.

When I grew up, which was really in the 30s and the 40s, the movies were a moral guideline for me.

I never cared what anyone thought about me.

If there should be one place where you should forget politics, forget whether you’re liberal or conservative, whether you hate Trump or love him, it should be the ballgame.

It’s funny, I never watch TV. I watch Fox News.

I’m not a pessimist. I do believe that in some way we don’t understand, God has a hand in things and it will all work out for America. Our money says In God We Trust. And we are the best country, aren’t we?

In ’08, Barrack Obama was famously elected president. Even though I’d supported McCain and dreaded what I feared Barrack might do, I felt a surge of elation when the networks announced he’d won. I really hadn’t thought the U.S. would go for an African-American for a decade or so.

In New Jersey, judges have ruled that a same-sex couple or a single person applying to adopt must be given the same place in line as a married man and woman. I think that’s bad for kids. This makes me homophobic? I’m in show business. Half the people in my life are gay.

It’s wrong to make a living off the theater. Theater should be supported, like redwood trees. You should make your living – whether you’re a writer or an actor or a director – in movies or commercials. But you do theater out of love.

It’s never been written about, but before the blacklist of Dalton Trumbo and the Hollywood Ten, there was a de facto blacklist by Communists in the movie industry, and there were a lot of them.

We believe in satisfying our own needs but always considering others.

Cecil B. DeMille worshipped the almighty buck.

I am dedicated to giving my kids the memory of happy parents. So I spend a lot of time with them. We really know each other. If they should decide later on that they hate me, at least they’ll know who they’re hating.

I paid a price for being on game shows and that was not being taken seriously. But so what? I did what I did and I was glad. But it’s a strange form of immortality.

God is being siphoned out of the public arena. People don’t even say God bless you when you sneeze anymore. I want to be able to lay a Merry Christmas on someone without its feeling like a political statement.

Men are attracted to youth and beauty; women are attracted to power.

I was blacklisted and overnight my TV appearances dried up. Ed Sullivan called to cancel my appearance and said he’d help me when he could, and a year later he did. Only a few wackos wanted the blacklist. It was a protection racket.

For most of my life I didn’t believe in God. Who had time?

I made up my mind I was going to walk that thin line between fame and oblivion.

I don’t expect to be another Walt Disney, but I do get a terrific bang out of being able to say things with pictures. Maybe that means something deep and profound about me – but I doubt it.

Possessions can possess you. Even a lawn can possess you. It makes you buy a garden hose. Which makes you water. Which cuts into time you might be happier spending some other way.

War was a way of life for Americans in the early forties. Heroism was expected.

Advertising has always been part show biz.

Old people come up to me and say, ‘Are you still alive? I used to watch you on ‘To Tell The Truth’ when I was a kid.’

I’d lived through World War II and hadn’t been able to wait to join the army as soon as I turned 18.

I had come to New York seeking my fortune after a few years of honing my craft as a stand-up on the road.

I don’t spend my life making money to spend tomorrow, or to acquire possessions.

I think people are afraid to be original.

Being happy is a revolutionary act; I think it spreads, like ripples in a pond.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have an empty spot at the center of him, which must be filled in order to be really happy. That spot, like it or not, is reserved for God.

I remember the glory days of film making. I used to go to the movies a lot.

I’m greedy for experience. I keep finding new things.

I don’t believe most kids enjoy school at all, and that’s a shameful waste, considering how curious and excited kids are to learn. They’re naturally curious, full of wonder.

I was living in a four-story Manhattan townhouse with three full-time servants and silver to be polished, and I was doing too much. My kids were growing up without me, and suddenly I thought, ‘I want some other stuff.’ So I stopped working instead of cutting back, and went to Australia instead of Vermont.

Children can become self-reliant and self-disciplined by being free to do what they want to do.

When I was a kid, FDR on the radio said, ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ We should be afraid of fear, or at least of acting out of it.

I mean, acting is so easy! I love it and I’m good at it.

I think God loves to hear little kids laugh at fart jokes. He didn’t just make sunsets and bluebirds, He made hot babes. And dirty old men like me. That’s the modest message I’ve set out to tell the world: you don’t have to be Ned Flanders to be a Christian.

I knew people who were real Communists but never made it onto the blacklist and kept on working. There were also people reputed to be Communists who weren’t.

Back in the fifties (the nineteen fifties, not the eighteen fifties) I did some writing for Mad Magazine, along with my friend Ernie Kovaks and a pair of comics named Bob and Ray.