Truth is the baby of the world. It never gets old.
Dick GregoryRead
I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no white dude would come into my neighborhood after dark.
Interpretation
The quote humorously reflects on the skepticism of a child towards the existence of Santa Claus based on societal realities.
Dick Gregory's quote highlights a child's innocent yet critical perspective on the traditional figure of Santa Claus, implying that racial and social contexts play a significant role in shaping beliefs. By suggesting that a white man would not venture into a predominantly Black neighborhood after dark, Gregory uses humor to critique societal issues related to race, safety, and trust.
In practice
In a comedy routine discussing childhood beliefs.
Truth is the baby of the world. It never gets old.
I never thought I'd see the day that I would see white folks as frightened, or more so, than black folks was during the civil rights movement when we was in Mississippi.
Just being a Negro doesn't qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine.
We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.
Because I'm a civil rights activist, I am also an animal rights activist. Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and vicious taking of life. We shouldn't be a part of it.
We thought I was going to be a great athlete, and we were wrong, and I thought I was going to be a great entertainer, and that wasn't it either. I'm going to be an American Citizen. First class.
I wouldnβt mind going to jail if I had three cellmates who played bridge
In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.
The great thing about the comedy world is that everybody is somewhat of an outsider. That's the community where outsiders feel like they're insiders.
I have rooms full of little dongly things and don't want any more. Half the little dongly things I've got, I don't even know what gizmo they're for. More importantly, half the gizmos I've got, I don't know where their little dongly thing is.
A well-developed sense of humor is the pole that adds balance to your steps as you walk the tightrope of life.
Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.
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