Everybody was being decent, and when people are decent, thing work out for everybody. That has been my theory all through life. If you're making money, let the other fellow make it too. If somebody's getting hurt, it's bad, but if you can work a thing out so that everybody profits that's the ideal business.

Bennett Cerf

The person who can bring the spirit of laughter into a room is indeed blessed.

Bennett Cerf

laughter blessed happiness

Reading is a pleasure of the mind, which means that it is a little like a sport: your eagerness and knowledge and quickness count for something. The fun of reading is not that something is told to you, but that you stretch your mind. Your own imagination works along with the authors, or even goes beyond his, yields the same or different conclusions, and your ideas develop as you understand his.

Bennett Cerf

reading fun sports

Gross ignorance is 144 times worse than ordinary ignorance.

Bennett Cerf

gross ignorance ordinary

Middle age is when your old classmates are so grey and wrinkled and bald they don't recognize you.

Bennett Cerf

middle age birthday

Politicians are like ships: noisiest when lost in a fog.

Bennett Cerf

ships fog politician

In a notable family called Stein

Bennett Cerf

crazy poetry writing

Football season: The only time of the year when a man can walk down the street with a blond on one arm and a blanket on the other without encountering raised eyebrows.

Bennett Cerf

football men years

There once was a student named Bessor Whose knowledge grew lessor and lessor. It at last grew so small He knew nothing at all, And today he's a college professor!

Bennett Cerf

college teaching today

The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.

Bennett Cerf

detroit lasts night

They tell about a fifteen-year-old boy in an orphans' home who had an incurable stutter. One Sunday the minister was detained and the boy volunteered to say the prayer in his stead. He did it perfectly, too, without a single stutter. Later he explained, "I don't stutter when I talk to God. He loves me."

Bennett Cerf

sunday prayer home

I think the right to read, is one of our inherent rights, and I think that people in America today are intelligent enough to decide for themselves what they want to read. Without being told, by self-appointed people, you must not read this, or you cannot read this.

Bennett Cerf

intelligent rights thinking

Good manners: The noise you don't make when you're eating soup.

Bennett Cerf

soup cooking food

I can't say this too often - that a little humor can make life worth living. That has always been my credo. Somebody once asked me, 'What would you like your epitaph to be?' I've always said that I'd like it to be: He left people a little happier than they were when he came into the room.

Bennett Cerf

littles people rooms

One of the greatest threats facing book publishing, and the entire country for that matter, is censorship.

Bennett Cerf

matter country book

Television, I love it, everything that happened before television lumped together, never caused folks to turn on a street to stare at me, or waitresses to ask for autographs.

Bennett Cerf

waitress together television

Banquet: a plate of cold, hairy chicken and artificially coloured green peas completely surrounded by dreary speeches and appeals for donations.

Bennett Cerf

speech cooking food

One of the troubles of the day, observes Mr. C.N. Peac, is that once we came upon the little red schoolhouse, whereas now we come upon the little-read school boy.

Bennett Cerf

teaching education school

An oboe is an ill-wind that nobody blows good.

Bennett Cerf

oboes blow wind

Most of the things that are supposed to be so objectionable in books are things that every teenager, in the United States, not only knows, but has talked about at length in school, or on the way home from school.

Bennett Cerf

teenager home book

Do I believe in ghosts? Of course I do. So do you. Deep in the souls of the most sophisticated of us is lurking a fear of the supernatural which all the discoveries of scientists cannot eradicate.

Bennett Cerf

soul discovery believe