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Bill Cosby Quotes

Actor/Comedian

By Jessica McElrath, About.com

  • In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.

  • I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

  • Always end the name of your child with a vowel, so that when you yell the name will carry.

  • As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak: she gave me a younger brother named Russell, who taught me what was meant by "survival of the fittest."

  • Children today know more about sex than I or my father did.

  • Even though your kids will consistently do the exact opposite of what you're telling them to do, you have to keep loving them just as much.

  • Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.

  • Human beings are the only creatures on earth that allow their children to come back home.

  • If the new American father feels bewildered and even defeated, let him take comfort from the fact that whatever he does in any fathering situation has a fifty percent chance of being right.

  • My childhood should have taught me lessons for my own fatherhood, but it didn't because parenting can only be learned by people who have no children.

  • No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I'm not talking about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.

  • Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

  • Parents are not interested in justice, they're interested in peace and quiet.

  • Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.

  • The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.

  • I am certainly not an authority on love because there are no authorities on love, just those who've had luck with it and those who haven't.

  • Let us now set forth one of the fundamental truths about marriage: the wife is in charge.

  • Men and women belong to different species and communications between them is still in its infancy.

  • That married couples can live together day after day is a miracle the Vatican has overlooked.

  • The heart of marriage is memories; and if the two of you happen to have the same ones and can savor your reruns, then your marriage is a gift from the gods.

  • A word to the wise ain't necessary - it's the stupid ones that need the advice.

  • Advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

  • Anyone can dabble, but once you've made that commitment, your blood has that particular thing in it, and it's very hard for people to stop you.

  • Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them.

  • Gray hair is God's graffiti.

  • Like everyone else who makes the mistake of getting older, I begin each day with coffee and obituaries.

  • The main goal of the future is to stop violence. The world is addicted to it.

  • The past is a ghost, the future a dream, and all we ever have is now.

  • There is hope for the future because God has a sense of humor and we are funny to God.

  • There is hope for the future because God has a sense of humor and we are funny to God.

  • You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.

  • When you become senile, you won't know it.

  • The fact that I'm not trying to win converts bugs some people, but I don't think an entertainer can. I've never known any white bigot to pay a black man, unless the black man was being hung.

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