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

The advice I’ve been giving to people all my life – that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can’t give up politics, it won’t give you up – was the advice I should have been taking myself.

There are still people in my party who believe in consensus politics. I regard them as Quislings, as traitors… I mean it.

I have no desire to crow over anybody or to see anybody eating crow, figuratively or otherwise. We should all get together and make a country in which everybody can eat turkey whenever he pleases.

The government argues that First Amendment rights are outweighed by the need to prosecute those who transmit classified information and documents.

Someone once threw me a small, brown, hairy kiwi fruit, and I threw a wastebasket over it until it was dead.

It is a way to take people’s wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

If at first you don’t succeed, then skydiving definitely isn’t for you.

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

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

If the Soviet Union let another political party come into existence, they would still be a one-party state, because everybody would join the other party.

To some degree it matters who’s in office, but it matters more how much pressure they’re under from the public.

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.

A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don’t have a top for it.

Winning the election is a good-news, bad-news kind of thing. Okay, now you’re the mayor. The bad news is, now you’re the mayor.

Never injure a friend, even in jest.

The U.S. couldn’t even get rid of Saddam Hussein. And we all know that the EU is just a passing fad. They’ll be killing each other again in less than a year. I’m sick to death of all these fascist lawsuits.

Protecting the rights of even the least individual among us is basically the only excuse the government has for even existing.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

There’s a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other’s speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

I often look ridiculous in Japan. There’s really no way to eat in Japan, particularly kaiseki in a traditional ryokan, without offending the Japanese horribly. Every gesture, every movement is just so atrociously wrong, and the more I try, the more hilarious it is.

If you are not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don’t want to go there.

I think I was identified as a failed president because I wasn’t re-elected.

I have a very strict gun control policy: if there’s a gun around, I want to be in control of it.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

When things get so absurd and so stupid and so ridiculous that you just can’t bear it, you cannot help but turn everything into a joke.

The only way I’d be caught without makeup is if my radio fell in the bathtub while I was taking a bath and electrocuted me and I was in between makeup at home. I hope my husband would slap a little lipstick on me before he took me to the morgue.

There was a stool there, and some fella kept asking me if I wanted to sit down. When I saw the stool sitting there, it gave me the idea. I’ll just put the stool out there and I’ll talk to Mr. Obama and ask him why he didn’t keep all of the promises he made to everybody.

For me, it’s a purity thing about the joke itself. It’s a test of a joke whether or not you do it completely clean and it works. If it does, then that’s a legitimate item you have there. For me, it’s nothing to do with finding those words offensive. It’s just not what I’m in search of. Do it clean, and you are really earning that laugh.

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It’s literary suicide.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language… one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

They say marriages are made in Heaven. But so is thunder and lightning.

It was that famous joke: What’s the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? ‚Hey, I wrote a song.‘

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

The label ‚liberal‘ or ‚conservative,‘ any – every time I hear that, I think of the great Gilbert and Sullivan song from ‚Iolanthe.‘ It goes, ‚Every gal and every boy that’s born alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservative.‘ What do those labels mean? It depends on whose ox is being gored.

Political courage is not political suicide.

Be extra careful in the work environment with those who like to maintain their position through charm and being political, rather than getting things done. They are very prone to envying and hating those who work hard and get results. They will slander and sabotage you without any warning.

The two things in the world we all share in this world are laughter and pain. We’ve all got problems. The levels of those problems vary, but we’ve all got problems. When you can take things that are painful and make them funny, that’s a gift – to you and your audience.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

It is the duty of the President to propose and it is the privilege of the Congress to dispose.

In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

Free government is the most difficult of all government. But it is everlastingly true that the plain people will make fewer mistakes than any other group of men, no matter how powerful.

If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.

If you’re looking for the safe choice, you shouldn’t be supporting a black guy named Barack Obama to be the next leader of the free world.

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.

‚Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age‘ was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant’s thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.

I was always making my friends laugh, but I never wanted the attention of the whole classroom.

We are all here for a spell, get all the good laughs you can.

I did stand-up, weird and ignorant stuff about my career – anything for a laugh.

I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.

If you make any money, the government shoves you in the creek once a year with it in your pockets, and all that don’t get wet you can keep.

My son complains about headaches. I tell him all the time, when you get out of bed, it’s feet first!

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.

You can call me the bad boy chef all you want. I’m not going to freak out about it. I’m not that bad. I’m certainly not a boy, and it’s been a while since I’ve been a chef.