Bill Cosby quotes

[after his wife had beaten the children for disobedience] Now here's the funny part: she comes downstairs with a broken stick. She throws it on the table and begins to talk out loud... to... NOBODY! "Tell me you're not gonna do something when I tell you to do something? I mean, you MOVE when I say move! Think I carried you in my body for nine months so you can roll your eyes at me?! I roll that little head of yours down on the floor! You don't know who you're fooling with! I'll beat you until you can't grow anymore!"

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

We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go." I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't…". You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they're moving ahead on this? Well, they know they're not, they're just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you're just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out.

My wife and I have five children. And the reason why we have five children is because we do not...want...six.

We see a successful, elegant man now, but as a child, an adolescent, his life was not a done deal. Sidney respected his mistakes. When failure came, he never said, "This is too difficult, too hard," he had the resiliency to try again. His life is somewhere between astounding and unbelievable.

I am not interested in statistics that tell me things are not as bad as they seem. Things are horrible. I have met people crying about what is happening, but there is no solution yet. Our children are trying to tell us something, and we are not listening. I don't care what the statistics say.

My parents never smiled... because I had brain damage. My wife and I don't smile because our children are LOADED with it!! Oh, my parents smile now, whenever they come over to the house and see how much trouble I'm having. Oh, they have a ball! "Havin' a li'l trouble, huh, son?!"

A person with no children says, "Well I just love children," and you say "Why?" and they say, "Because a child is so truthful, that's what I love about 'em — they tell the truth." That's a lie, I've got five of 'em. The only time they tell the truth is if they're having pain.

[About his first-born child] My mother looked at it and said, "Oh, how precious!" I don't know why she said it. Well, I didn't know then. I know now, because my mother put a curse on me. A long time ago, I remember when I was a child what she said, and I later found out that mothers, all mothers, put a curse on their children. They say, "I hope, when you get married, you have some children who act exactly the same way that you act." And this curse WORKS! I mean, it started with that child! My wife and I have not been intellectuals since. Oh, my wife was pretty good for a while, but it didn't last that long. It didn't last two years.

But the reason why the curse works is because all children have brain damage. Now, for those of you without children, let me describe the brain damage. You come into the room with a Coca-cola, you set it down to grab the newspaper. The child comes walking in, picks up the drink, and you say "Give me that! Didn't I tell you not to drink it?" The child says, "Uh-huh." You say, "Tell me what I said." "You said for not for to drink your drink." "Every time I tell you that, don't I? When I have a drink, don't you drink it." "Uh-huh." "Now tell me what I said." "You said for not for to drink your drink!" "That's right!" So you set the drink down, turn to grab the paper, the child picks it up again and quickly starts to drink it! So you say, "Give me that! Didn't I just tell you to..." "Uh-huh." "Then why did you drink it?" "I don't know!"...brain damage!

Parents are not interested in justice — they want QUIET!

Now this...is the greatest...moment...in our lives. This is what we asked God for. This is what we wanted to see...if we could make! And I looked at it...and they started to clean it off...and it wasn't getting any better. I turned to my wife, I kissed her ever so gently on the lips and said, "Honey, I love you...very much. You just had...a lizard." Because the thing changed colors three times! And the neck and head didn't work it just [imitates a bobbing head]. And I said to the doctor, "Can you put this back? It needs to cook a little longer. Another three months maybe?" The hospital made us take it home.

My father walked to school 4 o'clock every morning with no shoes on, uphill, both ways, in 5 feet of snow and he was thankful.

My mother said to me: "When your father gets home, he's going to shoot you in the face with a bazooka! And I'm not going to stop him this time, either! You know, he's always wanted to kill you! The day you were born, he said, 'Kill it!' I stopped him from killing you for eleven years... [starts sobbing] ...and this is the thanks I get for saving your life!"

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."

You know what my father's favorite game is? "Come here and pull my finger."

It's always strange. I've had a lot of people work for me, and I've found out it's a funny thing that you give them Saturday and Sunday off, and they work so hard to get to those two days and those are the two days that they totally destroy themselves. I mean, you know you think to yourself, you say, "My goodness, I've really pounded these people and worked to them to death." And Friday comes and they say, "Yeah!" And then they come in Monday... [he makes an expression that looks like he's exhausted and upset] and say, "Boy, am I glad to be back here. I'm no good on my own. I was given two whole days and I just went crazy."

I once asked my father for a dollar for the school picnic. He told me how he once killed a grizzly bear with his loose-leaf notebook.

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

And mothers are always more interested in the condition of your underwear than your body if you're ever in an accident. And they tell you that, "I hope for my sake that if you're ever in an accident, you have on clean underwear!" Well, I thought that was what an accident was! Look, you're driving a truck. Here comes another truck, gonna hit you. Now, whether you hit the truck or not, you're going to have soiled underwear! Because first you say it, then you do it! Now here comes your mother to the hospital. "Did he have on clean underwear?" "Yes, we found it in the glove compartment."