I get that racism exists, but it’s not a catalyst for my content. I don’t need to talk about race to have material. My style of comedy is more self-deprecating. I think that makes me more relatable. When you deal with ‚topics‘ – race, white versus black – you’re not separating from the pack. You’re doing what everybody else is doing.

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

When you’re coming up with new material, it’s not always gonna be good. The only way to learn is for it not to get a laugh, so you can adjust it and come back the next day to see if it’s working right. Next time, you might get a different laugh. You’re constantly rebuilding.

It’s always interesting about God because it’s like all of the religions in the world say that they pray to the same God, and yet they ask that same one God to divide itself up and agree with this one and fight against that one.

Unfortunately, the people of Louisiana are not racists.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

Woman was God’s second mistake.

When you’re doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it’s most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we’re all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.

I do have a lot of gays in my family now, but some will never come out.

Today, Negroes play on every big league club and in every minor league. With millions of other Negroes in other walks of life, we are willing to stand up and be counted for what we believe in. In baseball or out, we are no longer willing to wait until Judgment Day for equality – we want it here on earth as well as in Heaven.

I’ve always had to conquer fear when I’m on stage. Basically, I was and still am a very shy person. It’s absolutely in conflict with what I do. But once I deliver the first joke I’m okay. It’s like I’m out there all by myself just delivering my lines to nobody in particular without ever trying to notice the audience in front of me.

As a comedian, I found this thing, this profession, that suits my mind and life force. To drop it to do something else? I just don’t get that.

Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other ‚studies‘ was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these ‚studies‘ are about propaganda rather than serious education.

If you tell a joke in the forest, but nobody laughs, was it a joke?

Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.

I would like to be the chronicler of something that I think is going down the drain very swiftly, and that is small-town, middle-class southern life.

Right now, when we’re hearing so much disturbing and hateful rhetoric, it is so important to remember that our diversity has been – and will always be – our greatest source of strength and pride here in the United States.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing, nobody had said it before.

All these walls that keep us from loving each other as one family or one race – racism, religion, where we grew up, whatever, class, socioeconomic – what makes us be so selfish and prideful, what keeps us from wanting to help the next man, what makes us be so focused on a personal legacy as opposed to the entire legacy of a race.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that oral teachers and sign teachers found it difficult to sit down in the same room without quarreling, and there was intolerance upon both sides. To say ‚oral method‘ to a sign teacher was like waving a red flag in the face of a bull, and to say ‚sign language‘ to an oralist aroused the deepest resentment.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

People gonna be they own individuals and have they own worlds and I can’t knock it.

If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative… you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

I believe in being an innovator.

I look just like the girls next door… if you happen to live next door to an amusement park.

There are as many opinions as there are experts.

I don’t like Los Angeles. The people are awful and terribly shallow, and everybody wants to be famous but nobody wants to play the game. I’m from New York. I will kill to get what I need.

I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that. But everyone else is kind of, with their calculating – is this the exact right mix? I think that’s – to me it’s anti-comedy. It’s more about PC-nonsense.

We are all different. There is no such thing as a standard or run-of-the-mill human being, but we share the same human spirit.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

I started in action, and then I went to comedy school.

George Carlin’s album, ‚Class Clown,‘ came out when I was in high school. I memorized a lot of that album. I’d come home from school, put it on, and listen over and over. I started memorizing it. I don’t even know why. I loved it so much I memorized it.

We don’t need to share the same opinions as others, but we need to be respectful.

I don’t think the Tea Party people are racist, except maybe a tiny portion of them. But there has been a deliberate effort – again, referring to Fox Broadcasting – to inject the race issue into it. They have actually called Obama a racist on television.

Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.

There are a lot of good women in New York.

I’m half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That’s why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I’ve seen so many.

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women… no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.

I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition.

We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.

Everyone does things differently on offense. Everyone’s goal is to score points.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

I’ve been doing comedy longer than I haven’t been doing comedy, as I was performing for three years before I even got on ‚The Tonight Show.‘ There’s truly nothing like it; it’s intense and exhilarating, even though it looks so casual.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

I believe that God breathed life into every person and that every person is made in the image of God and you have accept them as they are, on their journey. I’m not here to preach hate or push people down.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

My mother is from another time – the funniest person to her is Lucille Ball; that’s what she loves. A lot of times she tells me she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I know if I wasn’t her son and she was flipping through the TV and saw me, she would just keep going.

All of us, no matter how we look born into this world, feel something like the Hunchback. It doesn’t matter if you have a beautiful face or not.

Honestly, I like everything, boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny.

If segregationists had their way, I would not be a member of the United States Senate today, I would not be a top contender to be president of the United States.

What I really want to say: That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship. Everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers.

Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person.