To be a successful father… there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.

Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer ‚Present‘ or ‚Not guilty.‘

He didn’t come out of my belly, but my God, I’ve made his bones, because I’ve attended to every meal, and how he sleeps, and the fact that he swims like a fish because I took him to the ocean. I’m so proud of all those things. But he is my biggest pride.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

Ironically, parenting is a shame and judgment minefield precisely because most of us are wading through uncertainty and self-doubt when it comes to raising our children.

According to Ethiopian custom, parents wait to name a baby because children often die in the first weeks of life.

In the end, everything is a gag.

If I were a woman, I would love to have lots of kids. But for men, I don’t believe in it.

Just got back from a pleasure trip: I took my mother-in-law to the airport.

My mother was a powerful influence. She made me toe the line. If I didn’t have a perfect report card, she showed her disappointment.

My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.

Since the very beginning, Emeril’s had a sense of humor about me calling him names and poking fun at him.

My parents were the same in the pulpit as they were at home. I think that’s where a lot of preachers‘ kids get off base sometimes. Because they don’t see the same things at both places.

If you can’t make it better, you can laugh at it.

None of my kids want to be actors. They are actually very interested in being musicians. I think they like the process of film from the outside. Mad is interested in editing. Pax loves music and deejaying.

I’ll tell you one thing, since I’m married, single people look absolutely ridiculous to me.

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.

If you are a parent, you have probably already realized that your children are always watching what you do. And just as children watch their parents and emulate their behavior, so do employees who are watching their bosses.

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

God and I have a great relationship, but we both see other people.

My husband’s a pediatrician, so he and I talk about parenting all the time. You can’t raise children who have more shame resilience than you do.

Modern cynics and skeptics… see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.

I think any activity you have your kids in, you’re all trying to live vicariously through them. And you’re jealous of the kid that’s naturally more talented or has the facility, the body, the genes, or the God-given talent. People get jealous of that.

I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it’s the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills. It’s probably the most important thing in a person.

I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol.

You bring children into the world. You love them with heart and soul.

Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.

To understand Europe, you have to be a genius – or French.

I wasn’t going to shy away from getting married when I did and having a baby young and starting a family, even with the job that I chose.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

The problem with me, as far as getting married and having a family, is that my comedy is so important to me. So I don’t know if I’ll ever be as good a dad as my dad.

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

Children make your life important.

Just talk to me as a father – not what the Constitution says. What do you feel?

Why, I’d horse-whip you if I had a horse.

I’ve got the brain of a four year old. I’ll bet he was glad to be rid of it.

When you’re in comedy, people always come up and say, ‚Oh, it must be so hard.‘ It really isn’t hard unless you’re not good at it. If you can do it, its really kind of fun and easy.

If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?

Sometimes, it’s just easier to say yes to that extra snack or dessert, because frankly, it is exhausting to keep saying no. It’s exhausting to plead with our kids to eat just one more bite of vegetables.

It’s a funny old world.

Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open.

Of all the subjects on this planet, I think my parents would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

My parents pretty much realized that I would do whatever I wanted, and that was it, really.

I take my kids to school. And if I go to work, I go to work, and they visit me on set. I come home. I have dinner with my family. I have breakfast with my family. I have a very solid, very warm home.

The funny thing is people won’t let me pay for things. I’ll be in a restaurant and the manager will say, ‚Oh no, it’s on the house.‘

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

Everything I say is a joke. I am a joke myself.

We’re a phenomenally snobby society, and it’s such a rich seam. The middle class is so funny: it’s the class I know best, and it’s the class where you find the most pretension, so that’s what makes the middle classes so funny.

After momma gave birth to 12 of us kids, we put her up on a pedestal. It was mostly to keep Daddy away from her.

I particularly like Twitter, because it’s short and can be very funny and informative. It’s a little bit like having your own radio program.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

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

Most of the time I don’t have much fun. The rest of the time I don’t have any fun at all.

No man goes before his time – unless the boss leaves early.

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.

Why don’t they make the whole plane out of that black box stuff.

Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.

From there to here, and here to there, funny things are everywhere.