Bill Maher

"That's America for you — a red herring culture, always scared of the wrong things. The fact is, there are a lot of creepy middle-aged men out there lusting for your kids. They work for MTV, the pharmaceutical industry, McDonald's, Marlboro and K Street. And recently, there's been a rash of strangers making their way onto school campuses and targeting our children for death. They're called military recruiters. More young Americans were crippled in Iraq last month than in any month in the past three years. And the scandal is that Mark Foley wants to show them a good time before they go? When will our closeted gay congressmen learn? Our boys aren't for pleasure. They're for cannon fodder. They shouldn't be another notch on your bedpost. They should be a comma in Bush's war. If I hear a zipper, it had better be on a body bag. Why aren't Democrats and the media hammering away every day about who we're supposed to be fighting for over there and what the plan is. Yes, Mark Foley was wrong to ask teenagers how long their penises were — but at least someone on Capitol Hill was asking questions. We're the predators. Because we have an entire economy built on asking young people what they want, making the cheapest, sleaziest form of it they'll accept, and selling it to them until they choke on it and die. You know who's grabbing your kids at too young an age? Merck, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, by convincing you they're depressed, hyperactive or suffering from attention-deficit disorder and so they must all get medicated. The drug dealers hooking your kids aren't in South America, they're in the halls of Congress handing out campaign donations to your congressmen. Mark Foley says he never slept with those kids, and I believe him, because American children are so hopped up on pills I doubt any of them could get it up. From 1995 to 2002, the number of children prescribed antipsychotic drugs increased by over 400 percent. Either our children are going insane — which we might look on as a problem — or, more likely, we have, for profit, created a nation of little junkies. So stop already with the righteous moral indignation about predators — this whole country is trying to get inside your kid's pants because that's where he keeps the money Daddy gave him to stay out of his hair. I don't care if Mark Foley had been asking boys to describe their penises because I have some sad news for you: Your kid is so larded out on Cheetos and Yoo-hoo, he can't even see his penis. We live in a country where the ultimate consumer is an obese 16-year-old hooked up at one end to a Big Gulp and at the other to a PlayStation. So many of our kids today are fat drug addicts, it's almost as if Rush Limbaugh had had puppies. In conclusion, we can pretend that the biggest threat to “our children” is some creep on the Internet, or we can admit it's Mom and Dad. Because, when your son can't find France on a map, or touch his toes with his hands, or understand that the ads on TV are lying — including the one in which the Marine turns into Lancelot — then the person fucking him is you."

"We can't even reform the way we make pennies and nickels. This week we learn that making a penny now costs 2 cents and making a nickel costs 9 cents, which makes no sense."

"... if you rejoice in revenge, torture, and war [...] you cannot say you're a follower of the guy who explicitly said "love your enemies" and "do good to those who hate you". The next line isn't, "And if that doesn't work, send a titanium-fanged dog to rip his nuts off". Jesus lays on that hippie stuff pretty thick! He has lines like, "do not repay evil with evil", and "do not take revenge on someone who wrongs you". Really! It's in that book you hold up when you scream at gay people."

"... You're supposed to look at that figure of Christ on the cross and think, "How could a man suffer like that and forgive?" Not, "Romans are pussy -- he still has his eyes.""

"... according to the always reliable "Encyclopedia Moronica.""

"Now, it's a dodge, of course, straight out of the grand intellectual tradition of "I know you are, but what am I?" It's a way of saying, "Hey, we all believe in some sort of faith-based malarkey, so let's call it a push.""

"[Y]ou don't get to put your un-reason up on the same shelf with my reason. Your stuff has to go over there on the shelf with Zeus and Thor and the Kraken. With the stuff that is not evidence-based..."

"But the thing that's really disturbing about Noah isn't the silly, it's that it's immoral. It's about a psychotic mass murderer who gets away with it, and his name is God. Genesis says God was so angry with himself for screwing up when he made mankind so flawed (grr!), that he sent the flood to kill everyone. Everyone. Men, women, children, babies. What kind of tyrant punishes everyone just to get back at the few he's mad at? I mean, besides . Hey God, you know you're kind of a dick when you are in a movie with Russell Crowe, and you're the one with anger issues. You know, conservatives are always going on about how Americans are losing their values and their morality. Well, maybe it's because you worship a guy who drowns babies."

"President Obama keeps insisting that ISIS is not Islamic. Well, maybe they don't practice the Muslim faith the same way he does, but if vast numbers of Muslims across the world believe, and they do, that humans deserve to die for merely holding a different idea, or drawing a cartoon, or writing a book, or eloping with the wrong person, not only does the Muslim world have something in common with ISIS, it has too much in common with ISIS. There's so much talk ... about wiping out ISIS. You can't, not with bombs. You can only expose that something is a bad idea ... Cultures are different. It's okay to judge that rule of law isn't just different than theocracy, it's better. If you don't see that, you're either a religious fanatic or a masochist, but one thing you certainly are not is a liberal. To count yourself as a liberal, you have to stand up for liberal principles. Free speech, separation of church and state, freedom to practice any religion or no religion without the threat of violence. Respect for minorities including homosexuals, equality for women."

"[Islam is] the only religion that acts like the mafia that will fucking kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture or write the wrong book."

"Did you know that of the 14 states with the highest number of painkiller prescriptions per person, they all went for Trump?"

"The events of January 6th [2021] were a faith-based initiative, and Trumpism is a Christian nationalist movement. Magical religious thinking is a virus, and QAnon is just its current mutation."

"If you think America is more racist now than ever, more sexist than before women could vote and more homophobic than when blow jobs were a felony, you have ‘Progressophobia’ and you should adjust your mask because it's covering your eyes."

"And yet there's a recurrent theme on the far-left that things have never been worse! Kevin Hart expressed a view many hold when he told The New York Times, ‘You’re witnessing White power and White privilege at an all-time high.’ This is one of the big problems with wokeness, that what you say doesn't have to make sense or jive with the facts or even be challenged lest the challenge be conflated with racism."

"But saying that White power and privilege is at an all-time high is just ridiculous. Higher than a century ago, the year of the Tulsa Race Massacre? Higher than the years when the KKK rode unchecked and Jim Crow went unchallenged? Higher than the 1960s when The Supremes and Willie Mays still couldn't stay at the same hotel as the White people they were working with? Higher than during slavery?"

"The low point of race relations wasn't Kim Kardashian wearing cornrows, even though it happened on Snapchat and George Wallace standing in a doorway didn't. Because here's the thing, kids: There actually was a world before you got here. We date human events A.D. and B.C., but we need a new marker for Millennials and Gen-Z, B.Y.— Before You."

"Acknowledging progress isn't saying ‘we’re done’ or ‘we don’t need more’, and being gloomy doesn't make you a better person."

"There are a helluva a lot of Americans trying really hard these days to embrace a new spirit of inclusion and self-reflection, and this progressive allergy to acknowledging societal advances is self-defeating because progress and hope that we can achieve it is the product we're selling and having a warped view of reality leads to policies that are warped. Black-only dorms and graduation ceremonies, a growing belief that Whiteness as a malady and White people as irredeemable, giving up on a colorblind society – only if you believe we've made no progress does any of that make sense."

"It's not a sin, and it's certainly not inaccurate, to say we've come a long way, baby. Not mission accomplished, just a long way."

"Why do we allow the people who just want to bitch to always win?"

"The creative director of the entire shebang of the whole Olympics got shit canned because he once made a fat joke in a private conversation. This is called a purge. It’s a mentality that belongs in Stalin’s Russia. How bad does this atmosphere we’re living in have to get before the people who say cancel culture is overblown admit that it is in fact an insanity that is swallowing up the world?"

"Young people have to stop flattering themselves that they're Nostradamus and would have foreseen, had they been around then, everything that's unacceptable now. And for further context Mel Brooks wrote one of the most successful musicals of all time around the song 'Springtime for Hitler.'"

"That is not a conservative position, my friends. My politics have not changed. But I am reacting to politics that have. And this is yet another example of how the woke invert the very thing that used to make the liberals liberal. Snitches and bitches? That's not being liberal."

"This new idea that each culture must remain in its own separate silo is not better, and it’s not progress. And in fact, it’s messing with one of the few ideas that still really does make this melting pot called America great. … And that’s the great thing about cultural mixing, it makes things better for everyone. BTS can be a hit in America and I can get kimchi on a taco, isn’t that better than everyone walling itself off from outsiders? I thought walls were supposed to be bad. But we’re living now in a world where straight actors are told they can’t play gay roles and white novelists aren’t allowed to imagine what it would be like to be a Mexican immigrant, even though trying to inhabit the life of someone else is almost the very definition of empathy, the bedrock of liberalism."

"But liberals, as usual in this era, have now gone too far in the other direction, they under-romanticizing America. They have no perspective."

"I’m sorry your professor said something you didn't like. That won’t be a problem with the Taliban because you're not allowed to go to school. In Saudi Arabia, grown women can be jailed for doing the kind of things we think of as routine without the permission of a male guardian. China rounds you up if you're the wrong religion and puts you in camps."

"If you think America is irredeemable, turn on the news or get a passport and a ticket on one of those sketchy airlines that puts its web address on the plane. There’s a reason Afghan mothers are handing their babies to us."

"We’re not the bad guys. Oppression is what we were trying to stop in Afghanistan. We failed, but any immigrant will tell you we’ve largely succeeded here. And yet, the overriding thrust of current 'woke' ideology is that America is rotten to the core, irredeemably racist from the moment it was founded and so oppressive, sexist, and homophobic we can't find a host for the Oscars or ‘Jeopardy!’"

"And this is where your new Afghan roommates that you took in will prove so valuable because they’ll turn to you and say ‘Have you people lost your fucking minds?!’ Have you ever heard of honor killings, public beheadings, throwing gay men off of roofs, arranged marriages to minors, state-sanctioned wife-beating, female genital mutilation, marriage by capture? Because we have."

"What’s the lesson of Afghanistan? Maybe it’s that everyone from the giant dorm room bitch-session that is the internet should take a good look at what real oppression looks like. Ask your maid, ask your Uber driver, ask the Asian woman giving you a massage."

"America may not be the country of your faculty lounge and Twitter dreams, but no one here tries to escape by hanging on to an airplane. No, we wait ‘til we get inside the plane to fight — and only because they cut off the beverage service."

"To me, when people say to me sometimes, like, ‘Boy, you really go after the left these days. Why?’ Because you're embarrassing me. That's why I'm going after the left in a way you never did before. Because you're inverting things that I- I'm not going to give up on being liberal! This is what these teachers are talking about. You're taking children and making them hyper-aware of race in a way they wouldn't otherwise be!""

"I saw last night on the football game, Alicia Keys sang ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,' which now I hear is called the Black national anthem. Now, maybe we should get rid of our national anthem, but I think we should have one national anthem. I think when you go down a road where you're having two different national anthems, colleges sometimes now have … many of them have different graduation ceremonies for Black and White, separate dorms -- this is what I mean! Segregation! You've inverted the idea. We're going back to that under a different name."

"There isn’t just one true opinion. I’m a free speech guy. Now, I’m Team Dave Chappelle, but that doesn’t mean I’m anti-trans. We can have two thoughts in our head at the same time."

"Words have meaning, but not anymore. And when I hear 'transphobic,' 'phobic' has a meaning: Fear. I'm not transphobic if I merely disagree with you. It's not hate."

"Now, if we establish right here at the beginning that all three of us are supporters of all laws that protect trans people, that we believe in all the dignity, equality, and respect that can be afforded to trans people, can we have an honest, free discussion about this?"

"One of the reactions from someone who worked at Netflix said, 'This is not an argument with two sides.' Well, right away you lost me. 'It is an argument with trans people who want to be alive and people who don't want us to be.' Well, that's just ridiculous. Dave Chappelle does not want you to not be alive."

"You know, you're not automatically right if you're trans. You're completely equal, you're just not automatically right and it doesn't behoove everybody to get their mind around very new changes, I mean, we were boy and girl for a very long time. It's only been 10 years since — how long have we had gay marriage, you know? I mean, talk about the Democratic voter, I'm sure there's a guy in Ohio going, 'I just got on board with gay marriage, could you give me a minute?'"

"This idea that we're not any gender when we're born is very new and very radical that you're born, it's just jump ball, you have a penis, it could mean you’re a boy That's a very new idea and I'm not sure if I'm down with all of it and I don't have to be."

"NPR said it sounds like Chappelle is using white privilege to excuse his homophobia and transphobia. Wait, now Dave Chappelle can have white privilege? I'm really confused now."

"Also, vaccine? Mask? Pick one! You've got to pick. You can't make me mask if I've had the vaccine."

"I travel in every state now, back on the road, and the Red states are a joy and the Blue states are a pain in the ass. For no reason"

"The world recognizes natural immunity. We don't, because everything in this country has to go through the pharmaceutical companies. Natural immunity is the best kind of immunity. We shouldn't fire people who have natural immunity because they don't get the vaccine. We should hire them. Yes?""

"Well, Okay. But you know, people who've had it – I've had it. I mean, I shouldn't be tested anymore. I got the vaccine."

"The hospitalization rate for vaccinated is actually 0.01% and the rate for unvaccinated adults is 0.89%. So in both cases the correction answer is less than 1 percent. They [Democrats] thought it was over 50%. How do people, especially of one party get such a bad idea? Where did that come from?"

"We have to get back to life. I mean, you might look at the sporting events that are … all three sports are playing now including basketball, which is inside. Nobody seems to be having super-spreader events. I mean, you know, it was great. It was so much fun having a pandemic but, you know, buh-bye."

"Just resume living. I know some people seem to not want to give up on the wonderful pandemic, but you know what? It’s over. There’s always going to be a variant. You shouldn’t have to wear masks."

"Social justice warriors who are fond of governing by hashtag like to say that silence is violence. And we know that because it rhymes."

"Word inflation is a problem. You can try to change reality by changing the words, but you can’t. It just stops you from dealing with it. One of the bad guys in Nineteen Eighty-Foursays, ‘The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.’ It’s Orwellian, and Orwell never ends well."

"They [parents in Virginia] are not objecting to Black history being taught. There are other things going on in the schools… Like separating children by race, and describing them either as oppressed or oppressor. I mean, there are children coming home who feel traumatized by this. That's what parents are objecting to."