Bill Maher Quotations

They're talking about banning cigarette smoking now in any place that's used by ten or more people in a week, which, I guess, means that Madonna can't even smoke in bed.

Suicide is man's way of telling God, 'You can't fire me - I quit.'

We are a nation that is unenlightened because of religion. I do believe that. I think religion stops people from thinking. I think it justified crazies.

Religion, to me, is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don't need.

Things aren't right. If a burglar breaks into your home and you shoot him, he can sue you. For what, restraint of trade?

Curious people are interesting people; I wonder why that is.

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do.

If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, youd resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler - a mafia wife.

Freedom isn't free. It shouldn't be a bragging point that 'Oh, I don't get involved in politics,' as if that makes someone cleaner. No, that makes you derelict of duty in a republic. Liars and panderers in government would have a much harder time of it if so many people didn't insist on their right to remain ignorant and blindly agreeable.

Men are only as loyal as their options.

We need more people speaking out. This country is not overrun with rebels and free thinkers. It's overrun with sheep and conformists.

Let's face it; God has a big ego problem. Why do we always have to worship him?

Maybe every other American movie shouldn't be based on a comic book. Other countries will think Americans live in an infantile fantasy land where reality is whatever we say it is and every problem can be solved with violence.

I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder.

Everything that used to be a sin is now a disease.

Let's make a law that gay people can have birthdays, but straight people get more cake - you know, to send the right message to kids.

To me a real patriot is like a real friend. Who's your real friend? It's the person who tells you the truth. That's who my real friends are. So, you know, I think as far as our country goes, we need more people who will do that.

Women cannot complain about men anymore until they start getting better taste in them.

This is a ridiculous heat wave we're in right now, and to contribute, Newt Gingrich said that for the entire month of June, he will stop blowing hot air.

I think capital punishment works great. Every killer you kill never kills again.

We have the Bill of Rights. What we need is a Bill of Responsibilities.

This has been a learning experience for me. I also thought that privacy was something we were granted in the Constitution. I have learned from this when in fact the word privacy does not appear in the Constitution.

What Democratic congressmen do to their women staffers, Republican congressmen do to the country.

When you want to make it clear to the rest of the world that you are not an imperialist, the best countries to have with you are Britain and Spain.

If you think you have it tough, read history books.

I do think the patriotic thing to do is to critique my country. How else do you make a country better but by pointing out its flaws?

The tea baggers. The one thing they hate is when you call them racist. The other thing they hate is black people. But they won't say it.

Kids. They're not easy. But there has to be some penalty for sex.

Fame has sent a number of celebrities off the deep end, and in the case of Michael Jackson, to the kiddy pool.

The Bible looks like it started out as a game of Mad Libs.

The country has become much more conservative, partly because it's been taken over by the religious right.

I never thought I'd say this, what Obama needs in his personality is a little George Bush.

Jim Bakker spells his name with two k's because three would be too obvious.

The jury could get the case as early as next week, but the defense says they just want to introduce one last-minute load of crap.

Clinton left the White House with all the class of an XFL halftime show.

The Clinton White House today said they would start to give national security and intelligence briefings to George Bush. I don't know how well this is working out. Today after the first one Bush said, 'I've got one question: What color is the red phone?'

President Bush is supporting Arnold but a lot of Republicans are not, because he is actually quite liberal. Karl Rove said if his father wasn't a Nazi, he wouldn't have any credibility with conservatives at all.

Iraq now says that it will, after all, destroy its missiles. President Bush said, 'Please, I used to pull the same trick. There'd be an intervention, I'd make a big show of pouring out the liquor and then there was a case under the floorboards.'

Americans are finally coming to a point where they're accepting of religious criticism, is because George Bush is the first president who really put religion so front-and-center. He's the most Christ-y president we've ever had - and he is, not uncoincidentally, the biggest disaster we've ever had. I think even people who are religious don't like it shoved down their throat. I think people kind of get it on a certain level, that this is an antiscience administration, and we're living in a time where we can't afford to be antiscience - for environmental reasons, for educational reasons.

I was brought up Catholic and we show my mom, my mother, my sister and then I take pains to explain on camera, that there were years after that where I wasn't really religious. I certainly wasn't a Catholic anymore, but I still lived with some mythical man in my head. I didn't really put a name to a face, but I just knew that if I was in trouble or scared I would go, 'Oh God, please help me get out of this one.'

Sometimes I'm dragging my ass out to the airport at 8 a.m. on a Saturday and I'm wondering why I'm doing this, but once I walk on stage I know why...because I'm addicted.

The politicians are no prizes, but the people are even worse, they're so ill-informed. I never understand the pushback when I say people are stupid.

Americans are used to being pandered to and spoon-fed everything. In a culture that needs caffeine-free cherry chocolate diet Coke, you'd best deliver information with entertainment.

My father was a news guy, you know, he was in radio news. And so that was sort of in my DNA. It was something we talked about at the dinner table when I was a kid.

As a loyal American and I think a patriotic American, no, I don't want Sarah Palin to be president.

If you came into the theater believing in the talking snake, it's kind of hard to leave the theater still believing in the talking snake.

I said something recently about how the president [Barak Obama] should stop trying to placate the crazies and the right wing and the Republicans and stand up for the 70 percent of Americans who are not insane and stand up for the people who actually voted for you. That hit a real nerve.

I'm not a joiner. I don't like organizations.

Democrats are afraid of polls. Republicans aren`t afraid of polls. Republicans make polls. Democrats run from polls.

Laughter is sort of a natural truth detector. If you laugh at something, it's probably because there was some truth in it.

Everybody has a magazine and a channel. There are 500 channels and 500 magazines, and we wonder why we're not united as a country.

Whatever good religion has done, it has come at a terrible price.

When those myths were created, when the Bible was written, man didn't know what an atom or a germ was, or where the sun went at night, or why the women got pregnant. [Laughs.] They needed stories to answer the questions.

[Being a] conservative also used to involve the concept of people being free to do whatever they want to do, as long as it doesn't hurt somebody else. Conservatives used to be very libertarian.

People say to me all the time, "I get my news from your show." And that isn't the way they should get their news. But the choice is not between getting their news the right way and getting their news from my show. The choice is that they won't get any at all unless you give it to them in an entertaining package.

Barack Obama is the President of the United States, a politician in America, a very religious country, so I understand why he has to pretend to be a religious person himself. I say pretend because, I can only hope that someone as bright as he, wouldn't really believe that people can walk on water and ride a winged horse and rain frogs and you can change water into wine.

People are either good or they're not. Religion doesn't make anybody good, I don't think.

Don't vote for Republicans or Democrats until they clean up the open system of bribery that we live under.

Treason is when legislators vote against homeland security measures because it goes against the wishes of their political or financial backers. Treason is the fact that, as a terrorist, you could still buy a gun in this country because the NRA lobby is so strong.

People who don't like you almost never come up to you. That's a lot of years of saying things that I know a lot of people in this country hate me for. And the number of times someone has come up to me and said something negative, I could count on one hand.

I don't think George Bush is a good president by any imagination, but when he said, 'If you're talking to Al-Quaeda, we want to know what it's about,' it just proves one thing: If you're president long enough, you will one day say something that is true.

One of the reasons I still do stand-up is because it was so hard in the beginning that I feel like it would be such a shame not to redeem it that it's all fun.

People sometimes say how standup is so hard, and I always tell them that it's hard at the beginning.

People do not want to be disillusioned by the new president [Barak Obama]. The liberals felt, finally, this is our time. Now they're worried. Now what they see is more business as usual. We all want to give him the benefit of the doubt, we know it's a tough job and he inherited a mess, but at the end of the day, is it really change we can believe in when there's no public options and Wall Street reform has no teeth in it? It really looks a lot like we just changed the color.

The worst years of my life were the first two years I was doing standup. You're learning how to do, and you're going on stage in front of two drunks and people aren't laughing and you're broke. That's a really hard time in your life.

I was out at the HBO party, these are liberals, I imagine, and a lot of people came up to me and said, "Keep giving it to the president."

It takes the youth, really; they're the ones that should have the energy, it shouldn't be the old geezers, but the signs are very worrying. Half of them, apparently, don't believe in global warming. They think it's a hoax, which is more of that stupid, stick-their-head-in-the-sand attitude. Where is the outrage at the generations that have preceded them spending all the money? But the cynicism is so deep and so ingrained; I guess no one feels they can do anything.

There's more attention paid to entertainers than ever and less that they have to say. Not that entertainers were ever a great beacon of knowledge to begin with, but at least when the Beatles were the leaders of the culture, they had a message. It was brief; it wasn't terribly complicated. "Give Peace a Chance." "All You Need is Love." But at least they were trying. At least they had grown.

What is Kanye West's message? Like most rap, "I am the greatest person ever and you're not." I used to call it affirmative action for the ego.

Every time somebody says 'Islamophobia' it gives the people who are intimidating cover.

People, especially the liberals, just live in this world where if anything is said that offends anybody even a little bit, not only does that person have to apologize; sometimes they have to go away forever. Go away, bad person. My analysis of this is that most of us don't do anything decent in our life. I'm not saying we're evil. I'm just saying we don't make a contribution, so the way they [liberals] think they're making a contribution is to point at the bad people [which] is somehow even more pathetic.

I'm just honest. They [asians] don't want to see black people generally in their movies.

Let's be honest, half the marriages end in divorce. For me, it's never made much sense. I have a girlfriend and I'm not interested in anyone else, but I still wouldn't want to bring the federal and state government into my life.

I'm more likely to not invite someone back for not talking. If someone talks a lot, I can usually shut them up and control them. But with people who don't talk, if they don't really want to talk, they probably shouldn't be on this show, and that's fine. They're talented people with things to say, but sometimes people say what they have to say through other means than arguing.

Old Testament, is really one of the most wickedest books you'll ever come across. God is an insecure, rage-filled hybrid of Bobby Knight and Suge Knight. He's got these anger issues that you can't believe. He's like John McCain if McCain could fart hail. He's pro-slavery, he's pro-polygamy, he's homophobic, he'll kill you for masturbating.

Eell there always is a tendency in human nature to deify.

I ... would guess maybe about one or two out of five men is suited for marriage and probably four out of five women are better at marriage than being single and would like to be married.

People like the Mormons and the Scientologists, who I think should combine and make a Mormontologist because what they believe is just so out there it's just laughable.

The key to me, in religion, is just to treat it like it doesn't really matter. We have a Pope, we don't really believe him, we don't really listen to what he says, we don't really take him seriously. That's what has to happen with religion. It has to be marginalized and in the Islamic world, it's not marginalized, it's taken literally.

People are very narcissistic. It's not all their fault. We live in a society where there is a magazine for you, a channel for you, a perfume for you.

Recognition is one of the three big elements of comedy.

In fact, because people are religious, they think they can do bad things.

Nobody in America who wants pot has any trouble getting it, so maybe that's why we aren't seeing support for legalization. People don't think it's necessary to legalize it, because it's so easy to get it.

Stand-up is great because I can get everything off my chest.

I don't want to start a movement that mirrors religion. I don't want to create the church of the non-believers where I'm the preacher and we're all gathering together and reciting things.

Anything is depressing if you dwell on it. The fact that religion could end the world? Yeah, I guess that could be considered depressing. But considering that there's also a lot to laugh at, I think it's a good balance.

My thinking is, government is really there to do the things that people absolutely can't do for themselves. And that's mostly involved with the things that might kill you. And what might kill me? The environment and terrorism.

All I'm saying, as a fan, is I'm tired of the same song for 30 years. Can't we change the message a little? You've arrived. You have a black president. Every white guy in a commercial doesn't have to be the idiot and every black guy in a rap song doesn't have to be God's gift to the world.

I hear a lot of talk today about xenophobia. Is it really phobia if you have something to be afraid of?

Even somebody like Bill Clinton, who I happen to admire very much, the second he was out of office, I remember, he was interview in Rolling Stone and he said he thought we should have legalized marijuana. And I thought, gosh, if only you were in some sort of position to affect change in the last eight years where you could have done something about that.

When I was 5-years-old, I knew who Khrushchev was.

To me, being brave is an element that is so important with stand-up comedy. It's not essential. There are many comics who were just funny, and that's fine, too. But that's never been what I was trying to do in comedy. I was always trying to do something that involved not pandering to the audience.

As a comedian, I think we all look for those areas where the truth diverts from what people are saying. That's why politics is such a rich area for us, because politicians make promises, and they don't keep them, and when we point out the difference, we get the laugh.

I'm definitely good. I'm not bad; I'm extremely honest, and I allow no bullshit to pass by my radar. And that will always get lots of people thinking you're a jerk. But there are people who appreciate total honesty and questioning of the conformities in our society, and I'm heroic to those people. And I should be. It's an indictment of the rest of society who doesn't get that.

New Rule: If you can force a woman to look at a sonogram—to see what will happen if she has an abortion—you also have to let her see a crying baby, a bratty five-year-old, and a surly teenager to see what will happen if she doesn’t. And you have to tell her it costs $204,000 to raise it until it turns eighteen, in 2028, where it will be a slave to the Chinese, in a radioactive world with no animals, fish, or plants.

Religion is defined as belief in and worship of a controlling power and atheism is precisely not that.

This Ted Cruz guy, I mean, he incurred the wrath, really, of his own party. They don't like him. Democrats hate him. Independents hate him. Republicans hate him. Even Miley Cyrus, he's the one guy she refuses to lick.

Rick Santorum beat Mitt Romney in three states on Tuesday. Got a huge amount of fundraising. That's the good news for Rick Santorum. The bad news: people are now Googling 'Santorum.'

It's a little strange when you have never been to war, and you eye-roll about a guy who's got shrapnel still in his body, as Chuck Hagel does.

Sarah Palin should not be on vacation. She should be in summer school.