65 Years Later, the Best "Peanuts' Linus Quote Is Still an All-Time Great Comic Strip Moment

Sometimes it's good to make blanket statements

This got a little watered down as the strip continued, and Linus isn’t quite as intellectual in the various cartoon adaptations (his Bible monologue in A Charlie Brown Christmas notwithstanding), but he has a theologian's knowledge of the Bible and can pontificate like a Ph.D. in philosophy. It's fair to wonder just how many ridiculously precocious kids in Western fiction owe some part of their inspiration to Linus, both on and off the comics page.

Peanuts ran for just under 50 years. While Linus wasn't part of the core cast until 1952 (two years into the strip's existence) and didn't start talking until 1954, he quickly became one of the central characters. As a result, if you're looking to put together a top 10 or 15 or 20 list of Linus's best lines, you're somewhat spoiled for choice. It'd almost be easier to group them by topic, like how a few Peanuts collections are arranged by specific themes.

If you had to simply pick one, though, my choice is from relatively early in Peanuts' run, on April 26, 1961. It's not quite a political cartoon, but it's one of the few examples of Peanuts getting close enough to one to count.

The best Linus quote in Peanuts history

Peanuts is not generally anything that could be considered a political cartoon, but every once in a while, Schulz got in some decent social commentary. This is an example thereof, as Lucy’s insistence that everyone has to fall into a specific political binary leads to one of Linus’s funnier punchlines in the strip’s history: rather than having to be liberal or conservative, he politely requests if “there are any openings in the lunatic fringe.”

Some honorable mentions

This is the first entry in an informal 3-strip arc that ran in the middle of a week; the rest of April 1961 in Peanuts is devoted to one-shot gags and a few consecutive baseball jokes. The next two strips don’t have near the impact of the original, but they’re decent gags in their own right:

Linus had only been in Peanuts for a little under a decade, but he'd rapidly developed into what's now the best-known version of the character: Lucy's high-intelligence, low-experience little brother, who’s dependent upon his trademark security blanket to function.

Naturally, that made him a perfect foil to Lucy, because he didn't know any better than to question her usual decrees. Lucy's tendency to run rampant over the rest of the cast was already one of Peanuts' go-to jokes by now. Charlie Brown would simply take it in stride, while Linus frequently punctured her current argument, often to his immediate regret.

This was around the time that Peanuts itself had settled into what would become Schulz's go-to art style. While Schulz's trademark dark humor was in place almost from the beginning, '50s Peanuts has a remarkably different look and approach from what the strip would become. Every character is still recognizable, but they look and act more like kids early on.

This strip in particular just turned 65 years old, but the punchline has only become more relevant over time, and could be taken as a political philosophy by itself. The Zen of Linus: if you inexplicably have to be crazy in one direction or another, you may as well own it.