People From Birmingham

"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!""

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

"[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."

""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."

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

"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."

"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"?"

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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?""

"[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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Look, a phrase that gets brought up a lot with regard to Israel is "never again" -- an anti-genocide slogan often invoked in memory of the Holocaust, and it's always been open to two interpretations: there's the one that means "This must never again happen to the Jewish people", and the one that means "This must never again happen to any people anywhere." And in the West Bank, as in Gaza right now, it's pretty clear which one the Israeli government has favored."

"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!"

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

"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"!"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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?"

"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."

"[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."

"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?"

"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!"

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

"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."

"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."

"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!""

"John Oliver: You've stated that you believe there could be an infinite number of parallel universes. Does that mean that there is a universe out there where I am smarter than you? Stephen Hawking: Yes. And also a universe where you're funny."

"Congratulations, Dave, you've just constructed a straw man so large you could burn it in the desert and hold an annoying festival around it."

"… we were in a situation where, in the event of us launching a nuclear strike, the President's command would theoretically have gone through a man gambling with fake poker chips, who would've then tried to call a drunk guy wrestling with a Russian George Harrison, who would've then needed to send someone with a bag full of burritos to wake up an officer and tell him to go grab an LP-sized floppy disk and begin the solemn process of ending the world as we know it."

"Please, make sure your college years are the best ones of your life because, thanks to the debt that we are saddling you with, they almost certainly will be."

"When your rainy day fund is so big you've got to check it for swimming cartoon ducks, you might not be a not-profit anymore."

"He is truly one of the most revolting humans (minions) I have ever seen. In a way, there is no more fitting spokesman for the Trump administration than an entitled, elitist arsehole who refuses to take responsibility for the messes he makes, and who can somehow pick a fight with the Statue of Liberty."

"I’ve made so many people angry that they kind of blur into one unpleasant memory of people staring at you with somewhere between passive aggression and active aggression."

"You’re not supposed to see your country’s most famous author [J.K. Rowling] in the audience watching you. You’re supposed to look down at that point and realize that you’re naked and then wake up."

"Welcome to Last Week Tonight! I am John Oliver and welcome, welcome... welcome to whatever this is."

"The world's become so horrifying now. It's too easy to become cynical about things and that's not fair and it doesn't work. And in fact, there is hope for the world. And it is in the form of Wikipedia. Now, Wikipedia will save us all. I found this out when recently a friend of mine emailed me and he said that someone had created a Wikipedia entry about me. I didn't realize this was true, so I looked it up. And like most Wikipedia entries, it came with some flamboyant surprises, not least amongst them my name. Because in it it said my name was John Cornelius Oliver. Now my middle name is not Cornelius because I did not die in 1752. But obviously, I want it to be. Cornelius is an incredible name. And that's when it hit me — the way the world is now, fiction has become more attractive than fact. That is why Wikipedia is such a vital resource. It's a way of us completely rewriting our history to give our children and our children's children a much better history to grow up with. We seem to have no intention of providing them with a future. Let's at least give them a past. It is in a very real sense the least we can do."

"Jon called me and asked, "Would you like to host the show?" My first reaction was, "Yeah, sure. Whatever you want. No problem." It was only on hanging up that my knees started to buckle. I was like, "Holy shit! What did I just agree to? I'm about to destroy the most beloved show on American television.""

"Lest we forget, when Europe goes far right, they go far, right through Belgium."

"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.)"