Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The Chinese had gunpowder, but it didn't occur to them to put it in a gun. They possessed the compass but didn't go anywhere. They invented paper, printing, and a written form of their language, but hardly anyone in China was taught to read.
The blow back from the cold war is that a weakened Russia allowed Afghanistan to become a failed state, and then all this weaponry to flow into all these other conflicts. Our greatest triumph has almost fueled our most intractable battle now.
We feel no obligation to follow the news cycle. In other words, I felt no obligation to cover story in anyway, because we're not like I said, we're not journalists. And at that point, there's nothing sort of funny or absurd or to say about it.
If you love friends, you will serve your friends. If you love community, you will serve your community. If you love money, you will serve your money. And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself. And you will have only yourself.
Once I'm performing the show, I think that hour show has a certain intimacy with our audience. And that intimacy is through the lens and the live audience is a witness to that, whereas the audience at home is actually the object of my efforts.
It is hard to get mad at Donald Trump for saying stupid things, in the same way you don't get mad at a monkey when he throws poop at you at the zoo... What does get me angry is the ridiculous, disingenuous defending of the poop-throwing monkey.
The neo-hippie-dips, the sentimentality-crazed iguana anthropomorphizers, the Chicken Littles, the three-bong-hit William Blakes- thank God these people don't actually go outdoors much, or the environment would be even worse than it is already.
Last year, on a long car trip, I was listening to Rush Limbaugh shout. I usually agree with Rush Limbaugh; therefore I usually don't listen to him. I listen to NPR: "World to end-poor and minorities hardest hit." I like to argue with the radio.
Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes - the whole bag of tricks.
If the events of September 11, 2001, have proven anything, it's that the terrorists can attack us, but they can't take away what makes us American - our freedom, our liberty, our civil rights. No, only Attorney General John Ashcroft can do that.
Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why most news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated -- serious, bulky and blandly worthwhile, like a high-fiber diet set in type.
We are a nation that worships speed and power. And for good reason. Without power we would still be part of England and everybody would be out of work... Bicycles are too slow and impuissant for a nation like ours. They belong in Czechoslovakia.
I believe that people, more often than not, act with the best possible intentions. And when they don't, that's funny to me. That's why comedy ends up seeming cynical, because you're talking about the gap between what people say and what they do.
I can't tell you how many times we'll run into a journalist and go, "Boy that's...I wish we could be saying that. That's exactly the way we see it and that's exactly the way we'd like to be saying that." And I always think, "Well, why don't you?"
A lot of newspaper columns used to be written in a rat-a-tat-tat, fast-paced style - and they tended to be funny. They were a little relief from the grimmer, grayer parts of the newspaper, and one of the best people at doing this was Will Rogers.
I actually do not think that's how what's happening to our government is going to be stopped. I think people who are willing to be civically engaged and believe in the promises and the progress of the last fifty years that will save this country.
Christmas and the New Year are actually two holidays, so there is a plural, which in the English language necessitates the use of the letter "S." Now, I suppose you could say "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year" but you probably have sh*t to do.
I could never wrap my head around why the world and the President that Republicans describe bears so little resemblance to the world and the President that I experience. And now I know why. There is a President Obama that only Republicans can see.
Asia is the continent rhythm forgot. At best Asian music is off-brand American pop, like Sonny Bono in a karaoke bar. At worst Asian music sounds as if a truck full of wind chimes collided with a stack of empty oil drums during a birdcall contest.
The French are sawed-off sissies who eat snails and slugs and cheese that smells like people's feet. Utter cowards who force their own children to drink wine, they gibber like baboons even when you try to speak to them in their own wimpy language.
When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.
I live in New Hampshire. We're in favor of global warming. Eleven hundred more feet of sea-level rises? I've got beachfront property. You tell us up there, "By the end of the century, New York City could be underwater," and we say, "Your point is?"
I live in New Hampshire. We're in favor of global warming. Eleven hundred more feet of sea-level rises? I've got beachfront property. You tell us up there, 'By the end of the century, New York City could be underwater,' and we say, 'Your point is?'
Some would argue that the president himself benefited from a form of affirmative action because as a C student, he only got into Yale because his father was a wealthy alumnus. But the White House counters that Saddam is a menace and must be stopped.
Government subsidies can be critically analyzed according to a simple principle: You are smarter than the government, so when the government pays you to do something you wouldn't do on your own, it is almost always paying you to do something stupid.
Some people perceive me as an assassin or at least someone who can slip under your guard with a knife. But if you watch what I do, that's almost never the case. I'm just trying to keep the balloon in the air. It rarely turns into anything combative.
Egyptian comedy has a very, very old tradition. Our theater and our movies are just, like, amazing. And Egypt is kind of like the Hollywood of the Middle East. I mean, we had cinema maybe decades before the other Arab countries ever got independence.
After going to war against the U.N.'s expressed wishes, the U.S. is now admitting it needs the U.N.'s help. It's the geopolitical equivalent of the 2 a.m. phone call ever parent dreads: 'Mom, I'm not saying I wrecked the car, but I need a ride home.'
We only now talk to our own, on Facebook and social media we talk to people, we friend and we like and we follow people who agree with us and rather than engaging with people who disagree with us, we unfollow them, we block them, we non-platform them.
When you're accustomed to doing stand-up, so often you're the only person onstage and it's all your thing. It's very gladiatorial. Obviously, when you're in a scene with somebody, you're supposed to listen and react - and that's a bit of a transition.
Whenever you take over something that is popular and has a fanatical following that loves it, you're never going to please everyone. The trick is to have enough wherewithal to follow through with what you want to do with it and give it time to evolve.
You know that a given in life in human nature, is that at a sporting event, a baseball game, a football game, you never introduce a politician, is because he'll be booed. I don't care if he's the most beloved person in the world, its part of the game.
I'm not guaranteeing what we come up with will be better for the planet. There is ethanol, for instance, which actually nets out with more pollution at greater expense, and more harm to the environment than petroleum, but we'll come up with something.
Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that's when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.
It doesn't matter if the truth is right there out in front of your eyes. You will find a way, a mechanism, in order to keep your own system of denial. So as I always say it, denial is a river that runs in the - in Egypt. So we became very good in that.
I think that, if we do anything in a positive sense for the world, is provide one little bit of context, that's very specifically focused, and hopefully people can add to their entire puzzle that gives them a larger picture of what it is that they see.
The only really good vegetable is Tabasco sauce. Put Tabasco sauce in everything. Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin. The next best vegetable is the jalapeno pepper. It has the virtue of turning salads into practical jokes.
[Friedrich] Hayek is not protesting that things like child labor and stuff are good. He's just trying to show that when government undertakes to make everything good for everybody, this is what happens. And he addresses it to socialists of all parties.
I'm not a standup. I didn't start off as a writer, I learned to write through improvisation, and so that's the part of the show that can most surprise me. The written part of the show, I know I can get wrong. You can't really get the interview "wrong."
I would say laughter is the best medicine. But it's more than that. It's an entire regime of antibiotics and steroids. Laughter brings the swelling down on our national psyche and then applies an antibiotic cream. You gotta keep it away from your eyes.
What's funny about that office is it's entirely dependent on how close you are to the president, because the president decides what your role will be. If you get on with the president, that's great; if you fall out with the president, power can go away.
It's great having Bruce Springsteen on my show. We have so much in common! We're both from New Jersey, just from different neighborhoods. Sort of like how Martin Luther King and Margaret Mitchell both came from Atlanta. But from different neighborhoods.
We won't dispassionately investigate or rationally debate which drugs do what damage and whether or how much of that damage is the result of criminalization. We'd rather work ourselves into a screaming fit of puritanism and then go home and take a pill.
Medical researchers don't know much about head lice because they don't much care. The reason that they don't much care is, paradoxically, that they know a lot. That is, they know one important thing: there is no evidence that head lice transmit disease.
Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.
I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.
That whole thing has been overstated by environmentalists. First of all, what is it, rocks and snow? C'mon, what is that, you want that? Go to Canada my friend. Believe me, rocks and snow are overrated. I've seen otters - they look better covered in oil.
I think people are used to people in show business having a lot of hubris. I think I have a normal amount of self-loathing but because I'm in show business it's considered self-deprecation. In normal life I would just be considered your average neurotic.
One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.
The press has bravely and nobly eroded the public trust... What I'm advocating is the media come work for us again. Remove themselves from the symbiotic relationship that they have developed with the power structure of corporations and of the politicians.