Bill Maher

"I wish someone would just start Fly At Your Own Risk Airlines. How 'bout that? You can have your hair gel, you can have your lighter, you can have a fucking gun, how bout that? You can show up at the gate five minutes before the plane leaves, and pay in cash, like in the good ol' 1980s. The ticket just says "shit happens" on the back, because that's the way it is anyway."

"It's so childish, "greatest country in the world." It's like saying, "I have the greatest wife in the world. Not just the one best suited for me, the greatest wife in the world. And if you could have my wife, you'd kill your wife.""

"They keep pushing the idea, "The only reliable way to prevent pregnancy is to not have sex at all, because, condoms? Ooh, very unreliable, condoms break all the time." Okay. I've been using these things for thirty-five years. I've never had one condom break. Either I'm the luckiest son-of-a-bitch who ever lived--and I'm not--or this is the most reliable product since the toaster."

"People love a trip. Even a shitty trip! On the old Dating Game they used to send people to Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia. You remember this? When it was behind the Iron Curtain. And people would be like, "We're going to Dubrov--what the fuck? What? ...Who cares, we're Going!" Because people love a trip, they don't care where it is. And I'll tell ya why they love a trip: because people think, "On a trip, I might get laid. It's not happening here, but Cleveland? That's where it could happen.""

"I was just at the newly opened Creationist Museum in Kentucky.... And they have this exhibit of a giant dinosaur...with a saddle on its back. Because the world is only 5000 years old, so man and the dinosaurs had to coexist, and, of course, we rode them. A theory I thought laughable at the age of eight when I saw it on THE FLINTSTONES!"

"The problem is that the people with the most ridiculous ideas are always the people who are most certain of them."

"Republicans say that sex is bad, because with them it always is. It is!...I'm sorry, but they're just doughy, asexual, wonky, white people, and if you had to have sex with them it would be over in an excruciating three minutes. It's just, — and from the headlines of the past year I gather the only sex they're really good at, is gay sex. Really. Jeff Gannon in the White House press room, Representative Mark Foley, the Reverend Ted Haggard. I mean, that's a lot of gay when you're running against it in every election."

"What is with this campy fixation on all things Ronald Reagan? They talk about him the way gay people talk about Barbra Streisand. I think they want him on a stamp so they can lick his ass. I think they wanted to name airports after him so they can say, "I'm coming into Reagan!""

"Isn't he [Bush] the worst president ever? I mean, when his term is over, he has to walk back to Texas."

"And that's the key to George W. Bush: It's that he wants to be the smartest person in the room. But in order to be the smartest person in the room, you kinda have to fill that room with a lot of dim bulbs. And that's where we get the Alberto Gonzaleses, and the Harriet Mierses, and the "you're-doing-a-heck-of-a-job-Brownie"'s."

"Don't you miss the days when America was just morally bankrupt?"

"One of the complaints leveled against me is, "Oh, Bill, you're such a meanie. Why do you have to go after religion? It gives people comfort; it doesn't hurt anything." Okay, well, other than most wars, the Crusades, the Inquisition, 9/11, arranged marriages to minors, blowing up girls' schools, the suppression of women and homosexuals, fatwas, ethnic cleansing, honor rape, human sacrifice, burning witches, suicide bombings, condoning slavery, and the systematic fucking of children, there's a few little things I have a problem with."

"I think we need to change that old saying, "I don't need a building to fall on me." Because two did and we still don't get it. I think we all stick our head in the sand as a deep human impulse."

"You have to understand the Tea-bagger mindset; they have this nostalgia for this America that they think was stolen from them, that used to be, that was better – it's really the 1950s, okay? That's what they think was Shangri-La, and, y'know what they really don't get is that it's kind of insulting to a lot of Americans to pine for this era, cause it wasn't that good for a lot of people. It was good if you were a white man. It wasn't that good if you were Mexican, or black, or Jewish, or disabled, or gay, or a woman."

"I think the guy was mostly a coke dealer, but I didn't do coke. I never understood that drug. If you want to be edgy and nervous, go to work."

"You know what they cannot keep on the shelves in America? Guns, and ammo. Even though Obama and every other pussy Democrat has never even mentioned the issue, these people are so sure that he and his Negro army are coming for their guns, they're gonna confiscate your guns, and indoctrinate your children, and socialize your wealth, and then they're gonna replace apple pie with chicken and waffles. And then he's gonna appoint a Cabinet of Shaft, Foxy Brown, Dolemite, Mandingo, Superfly, Cleopatra Jones, and Blacula."

"I kid the Republicans, with love. I feel bad for them. They got nobody for next time. Who are they gonna run? Sarah Palin, reading off her hand. Did you see that? You saw this? She wrote "tax cuts" on her hand. A Republican so stupid she has to be reminded of the one thing– Tax cuts! This is like if you saw the coyote's paw and it said "Road Runner"."

"Y'know, every time in America some guy gets caught cheating, every media outlet does the same story: "Why Do Men Cheat?" Oh, take a wild fucking guess, would you? I think you're over-thinking this. They're not looking for fantasy, they're looking for...sex. That's it! They want sex. And not just sex; they want new sex. The way women want new shoes. Right? You have shoes, they're perfectly good shoes, you don't want those shoes, you want new shoes. We want a person, you want a shoe and somehow you're morally superior."

"There's a word the teabaggers have wanted to use since Obama came on the scene, but they can't because it's not the 1950s. They would love to say this word. It begins with an N and ends with -er, and it's not "nation-builder"."

"This is the first time in my lifetime that a president has been from a city. From a place I would go. He's from Chicago; I love Chicago! I go there! Would I ever go to Wasilla, Alaska? Or Hope, Arkansas? Or Plains, Georgia? Or Crawford, Texas? Not on a bet! There's a reason small towns are small: no one wants to live there."

"Van Jones got fired because he became the Scary Negro of the Week on Fox News, where, let's be honest, they still feel threatened by Harry Belafonte."

"I'm supposed to be all re-injected with yes-we-can fever after the big health care speech, and it was a great speech — when Black Elvis gets jiggy with his teleprompter, there is none better. But here's the thing: Muhammad Ali also had a way with words, but it helped enormously that he could also punch guys in the face."

"What got Van Jones fired was they caught him on tape saying that Republicans are assholes. And they call it "news." And Obama didn't say a word in defense of Jones and basically fired him when Glenn Beck told him to. Just like we dropped "end of life counseling" from health care reform because Sarah Palin said it meant "death panels" on her Facebook page. Crazy evil morons make up things for Obama to do, and he does it."

"The Democrats just never learn: Americans don't really care which side of an issue you're on as long as you don't act like pussies. When Van Jones called the Republicans assholes, he was paying them a compliment. He was talking about how they can get things done even when they're in the minority, as opposed to the Democrats, who can't seem to get anything done even when they control both houses of Congress, the presidency, and Bruce Springsteen."

"Mr. President, there are some people who are never going to like you. That's why they voted for the old guy and Carrie's mom. You're not going to win them over. Stand up for the 70% of Americans who aren't crazy."

"Christine O'Donnell ... was one of our most frequent guests on Politically Incorrect. People who may not remember Politically Incorrect because they're too young or they were watching Johnny Carson or something ... may not remember that we created people like Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham... we did like to book a lot of female conservatives. They were good press and they were good for the show. We loved Christine O'Donnell. I still like her. You cannot not like her. She is such a nice person. We have a great clip that used to be in our highlight reel of Ben Affleck on that show just saying "Please, Christine, shut up." Because I guess she would just go on. She was known back then as the girl from SALT. SALT being the Savior's Alliance for Lifting the Truth. ... So part of me for sentimental reasons is rooting for Christine O'Donnell in Delaware. The other part of me is rooting for her because she's going to get her Christian ass kicked in the general election."

"The Democrats are going to lose some seats, probably a lot. But not as many as they would have if the tea baggers weren't winning the primaries because I think voters are generally conservative. And when I mean — when I say conservative, I mean they're not comfortable with people who are out there, on the left or the right. And these tea baggers are out there. I've said it before probably on your show. When people get in a voting booth, it's like when they go on an airplane. They get scared. They tend to do things that are conservative in nature, even if they're liberal. ... I just think that people — they understand our country is in a lot of trouble. Even people who are angry understand that crazy people are not going to make it better. Christine O'Donnell like all these tea baggers has no plan, no agenda. No policy points. They have one advantage. They're running against Democrats. That's their big advantage."

"I mean it was bad enough when we had these people called the birthers who thought he was not born here. ... But I was saying last night that I've identified this new group and I'm calling them the churchers. ...The churchers. They're the people who don't think that he is a Christian. They think he's — he's a secret Muslim, Larry. I guess you haven't been paying enough attention. ... When I talked to him, he told me about his plan to use drinking water to sterilize white people. I get — whoops, I've said too much."

"I have a theory that the Internet makes people stupider — and also FOX News makes people stupider. You know the Pew group did a study recently and they found out that 10 years ago, Democrats, Republicans and independents basically got their news from the same sources, probably more from CNN, for example. Then we had this polarity. ... We do have two Americas. We have the America that's living in reality. The people who understand that Obama is a centrist liberal from Hawaii who is trying to dig us out of the hole we're in. And then we have this other FOX/Matt Drudge/Rush Limbaugh reality where he is a Muslim sleeper cell, Manchurian candidate who was sent over by his Kenyan father ..."

"We're going to get into partisan bickering because more than half of Republicans agreed with the statement that said Obama is trying to impose Islamic law on America. I mean that is a very radical thing to believe. And it's more than half of Republicans. Not tea baggers. Not radicals. The mainstream Republican people."

"I want to always be an interloper. I never want to feel like I'm a guy who is embraced by the people who are putting me on the air. I want to feel like I broke into the studio and took over and made them mad. If I'm not doing that, I'm not doing my job."

"The Democrats are very bad at selling their own product. The Republicans are geniuses at it. And I've said it before, a bad product well apologized for is superior in this country to a good product. The Democrats do have a better product, as bad as they are. Now it's unfortunate that they couldn't have sold what they're selling better and have better policies."

"This is a really fascinating time because, again, we live in these two different realities. I don't think it's ever been like this. I know there's always been a — shall we say passionate — a passionate divide in American politics. But I don't think there's ever been a time when the two sides just have two different sets of reality. I mean, if more than half the Republicans think that Obama is trying to impose Sharia law on the United States of America, that's not something that you can argue about. That's just something in their view that has to be extirpated."

"That's the problem with the Drudge-Rush-Fox axis-of-evil news bubble. Nothing gets into these people's heads. They only listen to what they want to hear. They listen to what confirms what they believe. And what they believe is what they got from these people to begin with. You know, when Glenn Beck had his big rally on the mall, he said something like — he at one point said, "Today, I was holding George Washington's inaugural in my hand." No — you can't do that — it's in Plexiglas. You can't — it's 200 years old. You can't give that to people to pass around and smudge up with their grimy fingers. But it didn't matter, because it never matters to these people because nothing they say is ever fact-checked. The governor of Arizona talks about how illegals — you saw this on the news — were beheading people in Arizona. When the press asked her about it, because it was patently untrue, she just ran away. Sarah Palin never talks to the press because they might ask her a question that she doesn't have a pat answer for. They know they don't have to deal with reality, because they don't have to go to what used to be the mainstream press."

"The sad fact about the mosque is the people who are building that mosque are part of the Sufi fringe moderate part of their religion. That's the good part. That's the liberal part. Those are the Hippies of the Islamic world. We should encourage them. The people who want to build that mosque, those are the people we should be courting. Bush used that guy. Bush — that administration sent him overseas. Yes, that's the way to fight terrorism. That's the way to win the war, is to get those people on our side, not to alienate them. ... I mean, the biggest population of Muslims in the world is Indonesia. They're not crazy. The second biggest is India. There's 150 million Muslims in India. They're not crazy. ...But Saudi Arabia, they're crazy. The Taliban in Afghanistan, they're crazy. Parts of Pakistan are crazy. Hamas is crazy. There's enough of them to worry about."

"The country can't get well if the people are sick. And the people are sick. Now, I know Obama's not been the best president and the Democrats are not the best politicians, but you know what? We elected him just two years ago to fix this massive bunch of problems we have. And because he didn't do it by football season, we are ready to throw him out on the street and bring back the guys who messed it up just two years ago. That's a little too impatient. Yes, when he got the patient, the patient was bleeding to death — he got the patient to stop bleeding. But, OK, the patient is not up and back at the office quite yet. It's no reason to throw the doctor out and get back the doctor who was using leeches."

"I don't hate America. I love America. I want it to be better. The only way we can get it to be better is to realistically criticize what's wrong with it. That's not what the Republicans do. ... I don't want to be a pessimist. I'm a realist. One man's realist is another man's pessimist. But, no, I'm not like Mitt Romney, whose book is called No Apology, the Case for American Greatness. Really? Always waving the big foam number one finger; we're not number one in most things. We're number one in military. We're number one in money. We're number one in fat toddlers, meth labs, and people we send to prison. We're not number one in literacy, money spent on education. We're not even number one in social mobility. Social mobility means basically the American dream, the ability of one generation to do better than the next. We're tenth. That's like Sweden coming tenth in Swedish meatballs."

"It's so interesting to watch it – every Republican debate – Mitt Romney deny Romneycare. Deny the one great thing he did in his life. But when he's on the stage with those other Republicans in front of a Republican audience: "How dare you?! How dare you accuse me of helping people!? I am as much of a cold-hearted bastard as any of the pricks on this stage!""

"Mitt and his ilk are always saying, "If only we ran the government more like a business." No! Government is there specifically for the things that are not supposed to run like a business. Government is not supposed to make a profit."

"If it wasn't about race, y'know, if it was really about what the Tea Party says their issue is – deficits – who ran up all that debt? Bush! Where was the Tea Party then? The two wars we put on the credit card, the prescription drug program that wasn't paid for, the tax cuts that weren't paid for, where were they then? *crickets!* But as soon as President Nosferatu took office, then, suddenly, debt is intolerable. I think there's just something they don't like about him... I cannot put my finger on what it is... Just some way he's not like them... Skinny! That's probably what it is. He's skinny, and that's why they hate him... Oh, and also that he's a Muslim socialist out to destroy America and wave his African wonder-schlong in your daughter's face."

"Women, they always want you to feel that, y'know, they like it when men cry, they think it's so sensitive. Bullshit. That is a trap. They don't like it. You can cry once when your mother dies. Other than that, keep it to yourself. They know people that cry a lot, they're called their girlfriends, they don't need it from you."

"... even scarier is why people have stopped thinking global warming is real. One major reason, pollsters say, is, "we had a very cold, snowy winter". Which is like saying the sun might not be real because last night it got dark."

"Over the last 30 odd years, Democrats have moved to the right and the right has moved into a mental hospital. So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge fund managers, credit card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture and the pharmaceutical lobby... That's the Democrats. And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat-earthers and civil war re-enactors who mostly communicate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans and who actually worry that Obama is a socialist. Socialist? He's not even a liberal."

"By now you've heard the constant right wing attacks on the elite media and the liberal elite, who may or may not be part of Washington elite, a subset of the East Coast elite, which is overtly influenced by the Hollywood elite. So, basically, unless you're a shit-kicker from Kansas, you're with the terrorists."

"In America, if a Democrat even thinks you're calling him liberal he grabs an orange vest and a rifle and heads into the woods to kill something."

"If you, the citizen, deliberately vote for someone who won't give you healthcare over someone who will, you need to have your head examined. Except you can't afford to have your head examined."

"When South Park got threatened last week by Islamists incensed at their depiction of Muhammad, it served or should serve as a reminder to all of us that our culture isn't just different from one that makes death threats to cartoonists: it's better. Because when I make a joke about the Pope, he doesn't send one of his Swiss guards in their striped pantaloons to stick a pike in my ass. When I make a Jewish joke, Rabbis may kvetch about it but they don't pull out a scimitar and threaten an adult circumcision. And when I insult Scientology, the worst that happens is if-[The lights in the studio go out.]"

"When it comes to scary-ass religions, extremist Muslims are like Godzilla and we're like, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret."

"Muslims still take their religion too seriously, whereas we have the good sense to blow it off. Catholics don't follow the Pope. In overwhelming numbers they divorce, they have pre-marital sex, they masturbate. And unlike the Koran, no one here seriously considers following the Bible literally. Guys don't look over their fence on Sunday morning and see a neighbor mowing the lawn and think, "Working on Sunday? I really should kill him."... But, before I conclude, it should in fairness be noted that, in speaking of Muslims, we realize that of course the vast majority are law-abiding, loving people who just want to be left alone to subjugate their women in peace."

"Jesus is great — is there a better role model? No. It's religion, it's the people who get in between — the bureaucracy, you know. ... It's the way people abuse Jesus. Was there ever a greater victim of name dropping?"