You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.

This line is one of Yogi Berra’s best-known “Yogi-isms,” a class of humorous, seemingly illogical remarks attributed to him in the decades after his playing career. It is typically presented as an offhand comment about ordering or serving pizza—an everyday situation that highlights Berra’s comic persona: plainspoken, literal-minded, and inadvertently philosophical. However, like many Berra quotations, it circulated widely in oral retellings, sports columns, and later quotation collections, and its precise first appearance and the exact circumstances (date, place, and witnesses) are difficult to document with certainty.

The joke hinges on confusing the number of slices with the amount of food: four slices versus six slices of the same pizza. By treating “pieces” as if they were fixed units of quantity independent of how the pizza is cut, the speaker produces a perfectly “reasonable” decision that is logically incoherent. The line exemplifies Berra’s comic appeal: it captures everyday speech patterns—practical, decisive, slightly impatient—while exposing how easily language can mask a faulty premise. In quotation culture, it also functions as a gentle satire of rationalization: we often change the framing (how something is “cut up”) to make an outcome feel smaller or more manageable.

1) “Cut the pizza in four pieces—I don’t think I can eat eight.”
2) “You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat eight.”
3) “Cut it into four slices; I’m not hungry enough to eat six.”