Actors From New York City

"Al Franken is ready for this job. It is time to get to work, and, Al Franken, there is a desk waiting for you in the Senate."

"I offered Al Franken $50,000 if within one year he could get one percent of the audience in a major market. One percent. A 1.0 share, I offered him $50,000. He didn't even have to bet me. I just offered a straight-cash payout. [...] These [hosts on AirAmerica] are amateurs. [...] Al Franken has no experience in the broadcasting business. None. [...] And he has no business being on the air. At all."

"No one saw what happened backstage. I didn’t tell the Sergeant Major of the Army, who was the sponsor of the tour. I didn’t tell our USO rep what happened. At the time I didn’t want to cause trouble. We were in the middle of a war zone, it was the first show of our Holiday tour, I was a professional, and I could take care of myself. I told a few of the others on the tour what Franken had done and they knew how I felt about it. I tried to let it go, but I was angry. Other than our dialogue on stage, I never had a voluntary conversation with Al Franken again. I avoided him as much as possible and made sure I was never alone with him again for the rest of the tour. Franken repaid me with petty insults, including drawing devil horns on at least one of the headshots I was autographing for the troops. But he didn’t stop there. The tour wrapped and on Christmas Eve we began the 36-hour trip home to L.A. After 2 weeks of grueling travel and performing I was exhausted. When our C-17 cargo plane took off from Afghanistan I immediately fell asleep, even though I was still wearing my flak vest and Kevlar helmet. It wasn’t until I was back in the US and looking through the CD of photos we were given by the photographer that I saw this one: I couldn’t believe it. He groped me, without my consent, while I was asleep. I felt violated all over again. Embarrassed. Belittled. Humiliated. How dare anyone grab my breasts like this and think it’s funny?"

"MCEVERS: So Leeann Tweeden talked about this today. She even released a picture where Al Franken appears to be placing his hands over her breasts. We should say she's asleep in the photo. She's wearing a Kevlar vest and a helmet. And Al Franken is smiling toward the camera in the shot. GONYEA: He's kind of mugging for the camera. And that moment you describe there, she didn't even know about it until she got home from the trip and started looking through the pictures that the official photographer had taken. And he gave her and others a disc. So that humiliated her and embarrassed her, she said. But it followed another problem with Franken on the same tour. He'd written a comedy sketch for them to do in front of the troops. She talked about it on KABC radio this morning on the show that she works on. She says Franken wanted to rehearse a kiss that he had written into the script for them. She said no. He kept insisting. She said no again. He insisted more. Finally she said OK."

"The election process and recount in Minnesota have lived up to the state's reputation for organization, transparency, and bipartisanship. The officials have been meticulous and every ruling has been unanimous. While Senator Amy Klobuchar is one of the hardest working members of the United States Senate, Minnesotans deserve their full representation. Once the Minnesota Supreme Court has issued its final ruling in this case, the President and I look forward to working with Mr. Franken on building an economy for the 21st century."

"He was between me and the door, and he was coming at me to kiss me. It was very quick, and I think my brain had to work really hard to be like ‘Wait, what is happening?’ But I knew whatever was happening was not right, and I ducked,” the former aide said in an interview. “I was really startled by it, and I just sort of booked it towards the door, and he said, ‘It’s my right as an entertainer.’"

"I consider myself to be an old-fashioned liberal. I'm a liberal the way liberals used to be when they were like John F. Kennedy and when they were like Hubert Humphrey. When they were upbeat and enthusiastic and mainstream. I am not a liberal the way liberals are today at least as exemplified by Al Franken and Michael Moore, where they're angry, nasty, closed minded, and not mainstream, but fringe."

"Franken didn’t apologize — in fact, he cast doubt on his accusers — and the only regret he expressed was for “having to walk away from this job.” But after a political career premised on exposing the depravity of Republicans, Franken himself stood exposed. For years, he had built his brand on always being in the right. Even as he relinquished his Senate seat, he couldn’t let go of his sense of moral superiority."

"In the United States of America, satire is protected speech, even if the object of the satire doesn’t get it."

"They spent so much money in his first campaign making him look like a buffoon ... You're with him for five minutes and you see that's not true."

"The first thing I want to do is apologize: to Leeann, to everyone else who was part of that tour, to everyone who has worked for me, to everyone I represent, and to everyone who counts on me to be an ally and supporter and champion of women. There's more I want to say, but the first and most important thing—and if it's the only thing you care to hear, that's fine—is: I'm sorry. I respect women. I don't respect men who don't. And the fact that my own actions have given people a good reason to doubt that makes me feel ashamed. But I want to say something else, too. Over the last few months, all of us—including and especially men who respect women—have been forced to take a good, hard look at our own actions and think (perhaps, shamefully, for the first time) about how those actions have affected women. For instance, that picture [when Franken appears to grope the breasts of a sleeping Leeann Tweeden, while simultaneously smiling towards the photographer] I don't know what was in my head when I took that picture, and it doesn't matter. There's no excuse. I look at it now and I feel disgusted with myself. It isn't funny. It's completely inappropriate. It's obvious how Leeann would feel violated by that picture. And, what's more, I can see how millions of other women would feel violated by it—women who have had similar experiences in their own lives, women who fear having those experiences, women who look up to me, women who have counted on me."

"100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (and Al Franken is #37)"

"Some of the same people who were instrumental in the Federalist Society’s effort to change our legal system are now working to help corporations increase their control over the flow of information. If you control the flow of information, you can control the conversation around important issues. If you can control the conversation, you can change this country. … But we can’t be satisfied with stopping conservatives and their corporate clients from controlling the narrative when it comes to our legal system. We have to fight back with our own. In our narrative, the legal system doesn’t exist to help the powerful grow more powerful – it exists to guarantee that every American is entitled to justice In our narrative, we defend our individual rights and liberties against corporate encroachment just as fiercely as we defend them against government overreach."

"Net neutrality is the First Amendment issue of our time. Today, a blog can load as fast as the Wall Street Journal — and, if the blog is good, it can get more traffic than any media conglomerate. But if bigger companies can pay for faster, priority Internet access, that blogger no longer has a shot. And these big companies know that when they pay for access, they win. They want preferred treatment on the Internet like the preferred treatment they get in the rest of their lives."

"I've said that net neutrality is the most important free speech issue of our time. It's true. If Republicans have their way, large corporations won't just have the loudest voices in the room. They'll be able to effectively silence everyone else. Every small business they'd prefer not to compete with. Every blogger who publishes something they don't like. We have to stop them."

"What I do is taking what they say and using it against them. What I do is jujitsu."

"When you encounter seemingly good advice that contradicts other seemingly good advice, ignore them both."

"The biases the media has are much bigger than conservative or liberal. They're about getting ratings, about making money, about doing stories that are easy to cover."

"The crash of 2008 was driven in no small part by unfair practices in the mortgage industry, which led to many consumers becoming trapped in loans they didn’t understand and couldn’t afford."

"If you listen to a lot of conservatives, they'll tell you that the difference between them and us is that conservatives love America and liberals hate America. ... They don't get it. We love America just as much as they do. But in a different way. You see, they love America like a 4-year-old loves his mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a 4-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow. Love takes attention and work and is the best thing in the world. That's why we liberals want America to do the right thing. We know America is the hope of the world, and we love it and want it to do well."

"Senator Franken made the right choice to step down. I applaud him and thank him. He is right that we are having an important conversation right now about the equal treatment of women in every part of our society. We have a long way to go in combatting these problems, but holding everyone to a high standard—including public servants—is an important step down that road."

"Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from."

"Our laws need to reflect the evolution of technology and the changing expectations of American society. This is why the Constitution is often called a “living” document. But we have a long way to go to get our modern privacy laws in line with modern technology."

"Listen, this is crazy. I look like I'm 75 years old. Nobody wants to watch an old man being funny. That's just a fact. No one wants to see this old man on TV."

"A lot of sexual harassment stuff in the news, and I couldn't help but notice a very disturbing pattern emerging, which is that many of the predators, not all, but many of them are Jews"

"I even found myself doing a routine on Saturday Night Live with my impersonator Larry David, who did Bernie Sanders better than I did."

"I've had some experience in this arena. So it wasn't foreign to me to have a woman say she doesn't want to see me anymore."

"This is a sad day for the Emmy's. It is, however, a good day for Larry David. I imagine the wife will be forthcoming tonight. (Accepting an Emmy Award)"

"(Asked if he believes in miracles) I believe that every erection is a miracle. (Curb Season 7, Episode 6 "The Bare Midriff")."

"(on not going to his high school prom) I wasn't aware of the prom. I had no idea that it was even going on, not that I would have gone. It's not the kind of thing that would ever occur to me. You would think I would have heard about it in school, but I didn't. (Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Book)"

"I tolerate lactose like I tolerate people."

"Pretty...pretty...pretty......pretty.....pretty good. (Curb Your Enthusiasm, passim)"

"If every student was like me in college, we'd still be in Vietnam."

"One thing about Hitler that I admire is that he wouldn't take any shit from magicians." (Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm, HBO special)"

"I like how if you criticize the war you don't support the troops. You're the ones sending them over to die, so how is it I don’t support them? If the army was made up of child molesters, then I'd support them. If we went to an all child molester army, I would be their biggest supporter. "Please don't bring the troops home. Stay the course. Keep them there a long time." But they're not child molesters. And they're not the Twins, that’s for sure. Where are the Twins? Send in the Twins. I'd like to hear that scene. "Jenna, Barbara... Daddy and I have talked it over and we want you to go fight in Iraq." …Ah, what's the use?"

"I have to let him know that he's potentially destroying his movie, that he could be making a terrible, terrible error. I needed to let him know that I didn't know or think that I was capable of doing this."

"Let me tell you something; I do hate myself, but it has nothing to do with being Jewish. (When accused of being a self-loathing Jew; Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 2, Episode 3, "Trick or Treat")"

"I'm not comfortable being preachy, but more people have to start spending as much time in the library as they do on the basketball court. If they took to the idea that they could escape poverty through education, I think it would make a more basic and long-lasting change in the way things happen. When we set up unrealistic goals and then don't achieve them, that's another example of internalized defeat. What we need are positive, realistic ideas and the willingness to work. Hard work and practical goals."

"In Alan Moore’s brilliant graphic novel, Batman: The Killing Joke, the Joker justifies his psychopathic behavior by philosophizing that every human being is just "one bad day away" from rejecting the polite veneer of civilization's morality in the face of an indifferent universe. To him, we are all amoral sleeper agents awaiting the secret code word to awaken us to selfish violence. Yet, even if the universe is indifferent, most people are not."

"It was my first time away from home, my first experience in an all-black situation, and I found myself being punished for everything I'd ever been taught was right. I got all A's and was hated for it; I spoke correctly and was called a punk. I had to learn a new language simply to deal with the threats. I had good manners, and was a good little boy and paid for it with my hide."

"Though movies (Taxi Driver for John Hinckley Jr., would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan), books (The Catcher in the Rye for Mark David Chapman, John Lennon's murderer) and songs ("Helter Skelter" for Tate-LaBianca murders mastermind Charles Manson) may articulate specific criminals acts, they don’t inspire the person's desire for violence. Science has proven that in numerous studies. It's tempting to blame movies, video games and rap music because they often express humanity's worst impulses, but impulses are not actions for most of us. And for the mentally ill seeking violence, anything can set them off. Alek Minassian, the self-described incel (involuntary celibate) who deliberately drove his van into a crowd in Toronto in 2018, killing 10 people, said he was motivated by his resentment toward women for having sexually rejected him in favor of giving "their love and affection to obnoxious brutes." Should we then demand that studios producing romantic comedies and publishers of romance novels be shamed into contributing to anti-incel causes? The 2017 Las Vegas shooter killed 59 and injured 851 during a country music festival. Should country music bear some responsibility?"

"When Bruce closed the schools, he felt he was unburdening himself of having to prove through his students that his system had merit. He didn't want to get into that. He wanted them to evolve and teach, but It was not a thing where you have to teach what I taught. You have to teach what you learned and that's going to be more than what he taught, hopefully for those students that understood what he was doing."

"The real movie stars were Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift. How could I put myself in the same category as Clark Gable? Tom Cruise is a great movie star. Do I consider myself a movie star? I consider myself a guy with a good job, an interesting job."

"It could be that today's conservative movement remains in thrall to the same narrative that has defined its attitude toward film and the arts for decades. Inspired by feelings of exclusion after Hollywood and the popular culture turned leftward in the '60s and '70s, this narrative has defined the film industry as an irredeemably liberal institution toward which conservatives can only act in opposition—never engagement. Ironically, this narrative ignores the actual history of Hollywood, in which conservatives had a strong presence from the industry's founding in the early 20th century up through the '40s, '50s and into the mid-'60s]. The conservative Hollywood community at that time included such leading directors as Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and Cecil B. DeMille, and major stars like John Wayne, Clark Gable, and Charlton Heston. These talents often worked side by side with notable Hollywood liberals like directors Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and John Huston, and stars like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Spencer Tracy. The richness of classic Hollywood cinema is widely regarded as a testament to the ability of these two communities to work together, regardless of political differences."

"I've seen Humphrey Bogart with one often enough ..."

"I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis."

"Losing Bogey was horrible, obviously. Because he was young. And because he gave me my life. I wouldn't have had a — I don't know what would have happened to me if I hadn't met him — I would have had a completely different kind of life. He changed me, he gave me everything. And he was an extraordinary man."

"It was practically a masterpiece. I don't have many things I'm proud of but that's one."

"I'm about as much in favor of communism as J. Edgar Hoover. I despise communism and I believe in our own American brand of democracy."

"All you owe the public is a good performance."