Immigrants To The United States

"Conservatives love to rail against “cancel culture” while trying to ban any speech they don’t like. So when it’s someone else’s symbol, it’s an affront that needs to be burned or banned, but when it’s theirs, it can be mandated by law, and anyone who doesn’t like it can just turn their head and not look."

"I know I talk a lot on this show about the bad stuff Ronald Reagan did. So to balance that out, I do want to mention something positive he did for the planet. In 2004 – and this is true – he died."

"Listen, as a 47-year-old who looks like a 67-year-old, I clearly don’t understand TikTok, but I do know perfect film-making when I see it, and that right there is perfect film-making."

"Project 2025 is born from an impulse as old as America. It’s an impulse that says "one class of Americans is entitled to lead, and the rest of us are lucky to be allowed to serve". That thinks there should be a limited government when it comes to rules they have to live by, but also a unitary executive to keep the rest of us in line. These are old, old ideas that have been shouted from podiums by the likes of George Wallace and Pat Buchanan but have now been placed into a new handbook for an only-too-willing president to use on day one. And in a perfect world, I would love if we had an opposing party better able to articulate a strong defense of our country’s ideals and that also consistently lived up to them. People are entitled to hope for more from the next four years than someone just not being Trump and for at least two Supreme Court justices to die. I’m not saying which ones I would prefer, but I think we all have our top two. And for anyone tempted to think, "Well, we survived Trump’s first term," first, not everyone did. And it should hopefully be very clear by now: a second Trump term really does promise to be far, far worse. Because if Trump’s first term was defined by chaos, his second could be defined by ruthless efficiency, and that should be troubling to absolutely everyone, because Project 2025 is a movement whose members joke about wanting a white homeland and insist women have to have more babies to uphold Western society. And its work could be about to be funneled through a man who happily calls his fellow Americans “vermin.” It is not subtle, it’s hard to miss, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it."

"When you fire everyone who knows what they’re doing and only hire people who will say yes to the rich guy in charge, that’s not a recipe for good government. It’s a recipe for the Titan Submersible. I don’t want scientific research about nuclear power being done by people without experience. I don’t want my latte being made by someone without experience. Oh, it’s your first day? I’m sorry, step aside, please. Give me the barista with a sleeve of techno-tan stick-and-poke tattoos and a septum piercing who’s worked here for five years and who hates everybody here. Experience matters."

"Okay, a few things. First, you don’t need a new dating app to find conservatives online. Just go onto any existing app and filter for people who describe their views as "moderate". Any single woman in a big city can tell you "moderate" just means "I’m a right-wing nut job, but I’d like to get laid, please"."

"Okay, that is essentially all the background you need to know about federal personnel management. If you’re bored, it’s over, and if you’re hard, welcome home."

"Trump as president was sort of like a hamster in an attack helicopter. Sure, he wants to bathe the world in blood and terror—he wants it with his whole rotten hamster heart—but luckily he doesn’t know what buttons to press and his brain’s the size of a peanut, so that puts some hard limits on the damage he’s actually able to do."

"That is really the Trump experience in a nutshell right there: hateful ideology, a promise to make life harder for minorities, all wrapped up in a non-sequitur so stupid it is inconveniently funny. The radical left invented trans people a few years ago? I’m sorry, what? Did they put it on Shark Tank and I somehow missed it?"

"The election is in full swing right now, and it's pretty much your usual campaign -- candidates offering policy proposals, trading barbs... and occasionally getting convicted of 34 felonies and complaining about the judge."

"[Unless] we force the government and the handful of large companies that control this industry to change their priorities, we’re going to be stuck where we are, like a bunch of fifth graders in the world’s largest corn maze begging for our fucking lives."

"Thinking of the negatives is pretty much all I do, along with speaking the negatives out loud and making jokes about the negatives all while modeling the latest suits from "Sir Michael Gambon’s Haberdashery for Oddly Long Gentlemen"."

"[There’s] no better tribute to [the Beatles'] legacy than having terrified children wander around Ringo’s nostrils wondering if they’ll ever see their families again."

"[Between] the attempted assassination of a central European leader, and the rise of a far-right party in Germany, Europe really seems to be playing the 20th century hits right now, even if some of their former history teachers refuse to see the similarity."

"Lots of people are 68, working, and paying taxes, and I’d venture to say most of them are not Nazi enthusiasts, other than, it seems, you and Mel Gibson."

"[The] U.S., where our constitution guarantees virtually unlimited freedom of speech, except, of course, when the Supreme Court decides it’s cool for a public university to ban drag shows. Yeah, that happened two months ago. It’s kind of surprising no one flew a pride flag upside down on their lawn in protest."

"I know it is not shocking that an episode of this show would advocate to support your local libraries; it's pretty much implicit in our whole vibe. My suit, glasses, and desk all practically scream "support your local libraries" to which the rest of my body would say out of respect, "Shh!""

"You know God! The freak known for building a nude garden He could watch all day. The guy who commissioned the construction of an all-animal fuck boat, and who sat back and watched while His own son got nailed. Oh, I'm sorry! Am I misunderstanding the Bible by taking things out of context? Forgive me, I haven't read it. I looked at the summary; it told me all I needed to know."

"Student protests against injustice generally age pretty well, and the efforts to criticize or crack down on them tend not to."

"Everyone who's ever been to a protest has, at some point, seen a sign and thought to themselves "Shit, not sure about that one. I'm here for abortion rights; do we really need to bring 9/11 into this"?"

"When New Jersey sends us mayors, they're clearly not sending their best."

""There's something out there that's better than our airplane." It is chilling to hear that from a Navy pilot and not the usual place: the Executive Boardroom at Boeing."

"While you can believe aliens exist or not, when it comes to UFOs, belief doesn't really come into it; whatever they are, people are seeing them. That poster in Mulder's office shouldn't have said "I Want To Believe", it should've said "Believe, Smelieve, What The Fuck Is That Thing?""

"Manchin's argument speaks to what can be so dispiriting about our current politics, because while there is nothing fundamentally wrong with civility and compromise, it does depend on who you're being civil to and what you're compromising with. 'Cause remember, this is the moment when one of the loudest voices in the senate campaign against Mangi is also happily encouraging people to "take things into their own hands" when it comes to those they don't agree with. And it's pretty scary to think that, in the name of building bridges, some appear to be perfectly fine finding a middle ground with those willing to throw protestors off them."

"The fact is, no matter how executions are performed, they'll never be humane. No matter how many times you call them "textbook" or claim it's "much better than anything they did to the victims", or show people viral videos of dizzy tweens on helium, it's never gonna be okay, and we are kidding ourselves if we think taking someone's life actually lowers the number of killers in the world; it literally, definitionally, creates more."

"I know I've spend a lot of time over the last ten years reassuring everyone that this show does comedy and not journalism, but I think we can all agree that the most important thing we do here is stir shit up."

"I'm not saying college is the right choice for everyone -- but it should be a choice."

"I'm curious, is it a rule that, to be in Congress, you have to be one of the weirdest motherfuckers to ever live?"

"One project leader in the 80s and early 90s is remembered for saying "No secrets" and "The only thing that will make me rip off your head and shit down your neck is withholding information." And I'm sorry, but that should be the mug."

"If you're funny enough, you can make people forget a lot of things, whether it's common-sense internet safeguards, lessons from previous relationships, or that they've been accidentally learning about financial fraud and human trafficking for the last twenty minutes. We're having fun, aren't we?"

"If your friend told you to download an app and you saw it in the App Store with good reviews, you might assume that everything on it was legitimate even before you saw MetaTrader's logo, which looks like three men in suits jerking each other off under a table -- an appropriate metaphor for cryptocurrency if I have ever seen one."

"Whenever they don't want to talk about something, it's probably worth you knowing about it."

"We have spoken to experts who have all told us that, best they can tell, this is somehow legal. Which seems crazy to me, 'cause it really feels like it shouldn't be."

"From the beginning, America -- like most countries -- was built on polite fictions by men who could somehow hold in their heads the idea that all men were created equal at the exact same time that they were drawing up the three-fifths compromise."

"Wait, he "loves drama"?! I'm sorry, I'm really not that comfortable with one of the most powerful people on Earth being summed up the same way you describe Andy Cohen on New Year's Eve!"

"You can see how baiting customers with one price and then switching it for another might be considered a bait-and-switch! There's actually a great Econ book on the subject entitled "Words Mean What Words Mean"!"

"It has to be possible to feel the pain in one community without denying it in another. It has to be! That is perhaps the most necessary precondition for peace because real peace here will clearly be difficult! It's gonna be struggled toward as part of a larger pursuit of justice which will, in turn, require an honest and uncomfortable reckoning with all the decisions that brought us to this point."

"There is a natural human impulse to protect children, to grab a toddler you don't know if you see them running into traffic, and if that impulse is broken or disincentivized by a government, there is absolutely a humanitarian crisis, no matter what any asshole has to say about it."

"Hope and joy are crucial here; they are the fuel that powers the ongoing fight for equality. And while there is a lot of fear and uncertainty right now, it is worth remembering that progress -- while not always linear -- is always possible."

"And look, do I think it’s bad if Disney pays more taxes? No, I don’t. That would be a good thing. I don’t love that it might happen not through meaningful tax reform but on the whim of one right-wing dipshit who’s scared of gay people and doesn’t understand the First Amendment. But hey: Ends, means, what are you gonna do?"

"Calling slave labor "chores" is a euphemism on par with calling Hitler a "best-selling author with a side hustle" or JFK's assassination a "bad hair day" or this a comedy show."

"Britain is basically Pompeii if Pompeii had voted for the volcano."

"Please, buy [Last Week Tonight Presents: A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo] for your children, buy it for any child you know, or just buy it because you know it would annoy Mike Pence. You'd be doing a nice thing in a really dickish way, and isn't that the dream at the end of the day?"

"Oh, why do I love Salisbury? It's simple. The population is 40,302. And their member of parliament is John Glen, a Conservative whose eight-year tenure has been widely viewed as a failure. (open brackets: "citation needed", closed brackets.)"

"You can't just hear a conspiracy theory, fan the flames, and then walk away! "Is Katy Perry Jonbenet Ramsey?" "Well, identity theft is a real and persistent issue in this day and age, and we really need to look into that!""

"It's like catching an ice cream cone out of the air because a child was hit by a car."

"In science, you don't just get to cherry-pick the parts that justify what you were going to do anyway! That's religion! You're thinking of religion."

"For the record if someone did that to me I'd hitch a ride to the International Space Station straight away; of course who am I kidding, they would never let me in, I've got spiders for hands! The internet is mean!"

"As far as I can see, this is a system that has enriched multiple companies and that pays and fires teachers with a cattle birthing formula, confuses children with talking pineapples, and has the same kind of rules regarding transparency as Brad Pitt had for Fight Club."

"Drug companies are a bit like high school boyfriends; they're much more concerned with getting inside you than being effective once they're in there."