Bill Cosby quotes:

Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.

Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.

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

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.'

People can be more forgiving than you can imagine. But you have to forgive yourself. Let go of what's bitter and move on.

Did you ever see the customers in health - food stores? They are pale, skinny people who look half - dead. In a steak house, you see robust, ruddy people. They're dying, of course, but they look terrific.

I'm not going out and hitting a 95-mph fastball where I can't see the stitches. I'm not on a professional football team looking to tackle a fullback who is built like solid wood. I'm a thinking person, and I've been blessed with the ability to see some things and talk about them in a way that registers in a humorous and funny way.

I cannot understand how the education of this United States of America has been fooled time and time again. Either make it separate but equal or integrate, therefore it will be equal. And it has been separate and unequal.

Now, Richard Pryor was unique. Many misunderstood his humor. He lit up the hallway, but they didn't understand his use of profanity. He didn't use it just to be using it; he used it in the context of his satire.

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.

When I was a child, I was living in the housing projects of Philadelphia. I didn't even have a Christmas tree.

Tons of comedians have said, 'I grew up learning from Bill Cosby. He's great.' But that respect doesn't mean much to the young people. They like their ginger ale with hot sauce.

The problems with kids having short attention spans is driven by entertainment, reset buttons on games, games having to do with getting somewhere and heads blowing up. Everything is 'cut to the chase, cut to the chase.'

Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem.

All around the United States of America - in the cities and the counties - our public education is suffering and has been suffering. Cuts, cuts, cuts.

It isn't a matter of black is beautiful as much as it is white is not all that's beautiful.

My observations are not bread crumbs. They do not dissolve. They are on record, on film printed in books, and found on the Internet. I am happy to share them. For this I was born.

The Cosby Show' made an impact on comedy, television and culture. We rejected lowering the bar.

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

I love Twitter, but some people use profanity so much that at some point it's like saying, 'Pass the salt.'

When I decided that I wanted to go to college, I wanted to be a school teacher for 7th and 8th grade boys because I felt that was an important time for them. I had gone astray at that point in my life and really wanted to help keep them from making the same mistake I had made.

I'm one of those who cut off seeing people after a certain time, when the weight is gone and they sound like the dementia is very advanced - I don't want to see that. I don't even go in to look at the body. That's not my last memory.

Racial humor was about 35% of my act when I first started. But I realized that it was a crutch. What brought it home was when another comedian said to me, 'If you changed color tomorrow, you wouldn't have any material.' He meant it as a put-down, but I took it as a challenge.

I was 23 years old, a freshman at university, and there I was, on the first day, sitting in a remedial English class. I was so ashamed I almost got up and left, but somehow I knew inside that if I ran away from this, I would hate myself forever.

In September of 1960, I was blessed - and I'm not saying blessed in the everyday religious way - when Temple University accepted me after scoring 500 on the SAT. I was 23 years old, and they put me in remedial. I was the happiest remedial person on earth.

If you have one of the worst schools in the city, then chances are the teachers are not going to care for you. Chances are the parents don't feel seriously about coming to meet with teachers.

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.

We are all anxious to be accepted. But if you have a strong mother and father who tell you that you don't have to dress a crazy way, or hang out with people who are looking for trouble in order to be loved and accepted, then half the battle is over.

God has not made anything that I know of that pays so much attention to who their father and mother is as us.

Education happens to be something that all people, all cultures, need to embrace. Math, science, the words of the world. To be able to speak and be able to have clarity and to be able to think. Those are the greatest of gifts.

It was hard for me, being in school. And nobody was there to tell me how important it was.

I managed my life to the point that at age 19 I was still in high school. I decided I was too old to be walking down those hallways.

For college seniors there should be a week of being allowed to cry. Just break down and cry because you are scared and don't know what's next.

I use the exercise room early, because I don't want to get on the treadmill and everyone's going 'Oh, Bill Cosby,' and then they come around to see how fast I'm walking, and it becomes very competitive.

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.

I think the part of media that romanticizes criminal behavior, things that a person will say against women, profanity, being gangster, having multiple children with multiple men and women and not wanting to is prevalent. When you look at the majority of shows on television they placate that kind of behavior.

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

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

Learning to read clusters is not something your eyes do naturally. It takes constant practice.

The truth is that parents are not really interested in justice. They just want quiet.

Family is conflict and it's something that we all relate to.

George Booth and I are both funny, and from afar, without meeting, admired each other's work.

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

Every success story has a parent who says, 'over my dead body.' Every success story has an old person who walks up to you and says, when you're acting the fool, 'you know I worry about you sometimes.'

Women don't want to hear what you think. Women want to hear what they think - in a deeper voice.

We've got too many young girls, who don't know how to parent, turning themselves into parents.

I'm not the healthiest, but I am healthy. I'm healthy to the point where there are things that I have to eat that I don't want to eat, but I eat it because I'm enjoying staying alive.

There should be marches in every neighborhood every day telling the people about the negativity of drugs and how the drugs help us to behave negatively.

Too many people are waiting for Jesus to come along and cut your grass. And Jesus isn't going to come along and cut your grass.

Nothing I've ever done has given me more joys and rewards than being a father to my children.

I don't spend my hours worrying how to slip a social message into my act.

I Spy' represents the absence of the tension of the black man or black woman or anyone of that color walking in, so that the white racist person can become entertaining to a viewer.

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

Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.

I think I am a good running back, but I'm really not that fast. There is only one thing I can do, that is throw a cross-body block. Picture perfect. I love it. Not that good at pass blocking.

There are some people who have trouble recognizing a mess.

I don't see much comedy in the Bible, where people are writing about funny people. It's not there.

I want to get violence - I want schools to start from K through 12 to just every day have teachers understand that they don't want to talk about anything that is violent, and they want to explain to the children how bad violence is and how behavior - violent behavior, is something that they really should not practice and think about.

Having a child is surely the most beautifully irrational act that two people in love can commit.

George Carlin is brilliant with words, and Johnny Winters is very creative. It's taking something common and drawing out the humor, being clever with words.

With my wife Camille's help, I took to social networking. I'm working with the computers.

There is no job a man can do that is undignified - if he does it well.

According to the State of Florida, the person with the gun has the right to defend him or herself.

There's a gap between people knowing what I do and really believing that I still do that - and wondering what it is I really do.

Immortality is a long shot, I admit. But somebody has to be first.

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.

A new father quickly learns that his child invariably comes to the bathroom at precisely the times when he's in there, as if he needed company. The only way for this father to be certain of bathroom privacy is to shave at the gas station.

My feeling is, personally, I want to die first... because I believe that when you die, your soul goes immediately up for judgment - and I don't want my wife up there first. No, the judgment will be horrendous.

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.

All parents experience the same problems.

When you introduce competition into the public school system, most studies show that schools start to do better when they are competing for students.

I guess the real reason that my wife and I had children is the same reason that Napoleon had for invading Russia: it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I don't care what right-wing white people are thinking.

I am proud to be an American. Because an American can eat anything on the face of this earth as long as he has two pieces of bread.

There are two sides to every story, and sometimes three, four, and five.

Parents are not really interested in justice. They just want quiet.

In your 50s, time becomes precious and must not be wasted. Every minute is an excellent opportunity for a good nap. Happy 50th birthday!

Gray hair is God's graffiti.

On many young actors that don't give their parents proper credit: I'm still waiting for some actor to win, say, an Oscar... and deliver the following acceptance speech: I would like to thank my parents, first of all, for letting me live.

The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.

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

The heart of marriage is memories.

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

One of the great mistakes that can be made by a man of my age is to get involved in athletic competition with children-unless, of course, they are under six. And even then, stay away from hide-and-seek.

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.

Sometimes you try to help people, and it backfires on you, and then they try to take advantage of you.

Nobody ever says, "Can I have your beets?

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.

Kids need to remember that when you put something on Twitter, it's not like whispering to your friend, you've put it on a billboard that the whole world, including your own kids someday, can see.

In spite of the six thousand manuals on child raising in the bookstores, child raising is still a dark continent and no one really knows anything. You just need a lot of love and luck - and, of course, courage.

Zip zop wop boopity bop.

Meadowlark and I share a common vision of bringing joy and laughter to others.

Fatherhood is telling your daughter that Michael Jackson loves all his fans, but has special feelings for the ones who eat broccoli.

Decide that you want it more than you are afraid of it.

Any man today who returns from work, sinks into a chair, and calls for his pipe is a man with an appetite for danger.

I was a physical education major with a child psychology minor at Temple, which means if you ask me a question about a child's behavior, I will advise you to tell the child to take a lap.

My children love my mother, and I tell my children, that is not the same woman I grew up with...That is an old woman trying to get into heaven now.

When a person has a gun, sometimes their mind clicks that this thing will win arguments and straighten people out.

Sex education may be a good idea in the schools, but I don't believe the kids should be given homework.

I can't even talk the way these people talk. 'Why you ain't?' 'Where you is?' Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.

I feel that in-person contact with people is the most important thing in comedy. While I'm up on stage, I can actually put myself into the audience and adjust my pace and tuning to them. I can get into their heads through their ears and through their eyes. Only through this total communication can I really achieve what I'm trying to do.

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.

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

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

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

A father has to do everything in his power to keep a tight ship, even though he knows the crew would like to send him away in a dinghy.

While fathers are pleasant figureheads, there is a special bond between children and their mothers. 'Do you help your mother clean up the house?' I asked one girl of seven. 'No,' she sweetly replied, 'I help make the mess.' It's a dirty job but somebody's got to do it.

I love it when mothers get so mad they can't remember your name. "Come here, Roy, er, Rupert, er, Rutabaga... what is your name, boy? And don't lie to me, because you live here, and I'll find out who you are."

We parents ask dumb questions, therefore we get dumb answers.

You know the only people who are always sure about the proper way to raise children? Those who've never had any.

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

There are no absolutes in raising children. In any stressful situation, fathering is always a roll of the dice. The game may be messy, but I have never found one with more joys and rewards.

Old is always fifteen years from now.

That's why ears have cartilage, to keep them from flapping.

I wasn't always black... there was this freckle, and it got bigger and bigger.

Never say [to younger people] "that was before your time," because the last full moon was before their time!

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

Pay off your student loan. Even if you don't have a job...Because when you finally get a job you're going to be one of us.

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

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