Bill Maher

"My politics have not changed. I am an old school liberal… when we’re talking about the race issue, they changed, not me… We should be moving towards a colorblind society where we don’t see race. That is the old way to look at it. I think that is still a good way to look at. That how we win, when it doesn’t matter what your race is--the quality of your character, not the color of your skin. That’s not wokism. Wokism we have to see it everywhere all the time."

"But there is a reason why the term woke has come to signify going to far and doing things that make no sense. I keep saying this to the Democratic Party. The reason why you're so toxic is because you have become the party of no common sense."

"Kids are taught and sometimes separated into groups, oppressor and oppressed. Again, does a kid even know what those words mean? Would they gravitate toward that if you hadn't told them? I mean, you're taking something that was getting better, race relations in America, and we -- I think everyone recognizes, everyone right-thinking, in my view, that still a lot of work needs to be done."

"You can't come up with good solutions unless you're realistic about what the problem is. I mean, it was only like 10 or 20 years ago that no state in America would vote for gay marriage. I mean, it was on the ballot like 35 times. Now it's the law of the land and no one is against it."

"[Cuomo]: It's just the truth, we're just telling them the truth, is that racism continues, it's systemic, it's in everything around us, but you have to be taught where it is everywhere because that's how we remedy it. And otherwise, you're just hiding from the truth." [Maher]: That’s nuts, it’s just silly, it’s just virtue signaling."

"So don’t put this into a this category ‘this is settled science’,.. anything that deviates from the one true opinion on this means you’re a some horrible bigot and transphobic. That is not what is going on here. I don’t think David Chappelle is transphobic… Maybe we are going too far with the children part of this. You know, kids should not be really making decisions about their gender."

"You're [Democrats] alienating a whole lot of people, particularly whites without a college degree, which is most of them in a country that is still 70% white. I'd say, 'Do the math,' but math is a form of white supremacy."

"This is a term [woke] folks like you brought out very recently, had been proudly displaying it every march since. Just last year, The Guardian declared 'woke' the 'word of our era.' I guess they didn't get the memo from the 'Mean Girls Club’… What a great strategy, never missing an opportunity to remind voters how lame and clueless and hopelessly uncool they are, especially since those are the ones who actually vote. But OK, fine. What word would you like us to use for the plainly insane excesses of the left that are not liberalism but something completely different? Because you can't have that word 'liberal' from us and think it should cover things like canceling [Abraham] Lincoln, and teaching third-graders they're oppressors. That's all your new-think."

"A more pertinent question to ask about the word woke might be why in such a short time gone from a rallying cry to a pejorative. If the word only made you think of rational, deserved causes like teaching a less whitewashed version of American history, AOC would still want to own it. But it's a joke because it makes you think of people who wake up offended and take orders from Twitter. And their oversensitivity has grown tiresome."

"There is always going to be another variant. We cannot go on forever in permanent hair-on-fire, cancel Christmas, hand-jobs through a hazmat suit."

"Beginning with recognizing what we are doing to kids is unnecessary and horrible, and I don’t even like kids. But making kids, where the Covid survivability rate of 99.98 percent, mask up like bandits. Unfortunately, the thing that is getting stolen is their education, their sanity, and their social skills. A study this week from a professor at John Hopkins concluded that the lockdowns we all suffered through had little impact on reducing COVID deaths. Okay, that’s kind of a big one to get wrong."

"Last July, President Biden said, 'You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.' Well, I already knew that was wrong then, and now we all do. The former Director of the CDC, Robert Redfield, believes COVID originated in a lab believes COVID originated in the lab, and now our intelligence agencies agree, it might have. But for months on social media, it was banned to even discuss it.""

"Look, I’m not saying the medical establishment isn’t trying to figure s**t out, or that they’re corrupt — although there is some of that, but how about just wrong? Wrong a lot. Wrong about HIV, wrong about lockdowns, wrong about kids, wrong about how you couldn’t get it if you were vaccinated."

"I’m just asking, how much wrong do you get to be while still holding the default setting for people who represent the science? Eat eggs, then don’t, then do. Take aspirin, then don’t, then do. The food pyramid, really? Bread and milk every day? Fifteen years ago, they were recommending trans fats. Now, they’re illegal, just like almost a hundred prescription drugs which were once called 'safe and effective' and then yanked off the market because they were not."

"But plainly, the medical-industrial complex has not earned the right to claim monopoly status on information about this virus or medicine in general. Yes, free speech has allowed people to hear misinformation sometimes. And a lot of it was yours."

"Thank you all for coming and putting on a brave face. To Will Smith: Stay strong and I got your back… April Fools. You’re a d***. I'm not here to humiliate Will Smith. He gets enough of that at home."

"Every single person in America was talking about the sucker punch heard 'round the world. That whole 'Keep my wife’s name out of your mouth' didn’t really work out."

"Then he sees that his wife is giving him the stinkeye. I blame toxic femininity. The Academy says from now on they may ban Will Smith from ever coming back to the Oscars, and my question: 'And what's the punishment?'"

"It exposed, I thought, a lot of aspects of this society we have which are not terribly positive — toxic masculinity, victim culture. Liberal hypocrisy, I think, was the big loser."

"These are the very people who are always talking about micro-aggressions in the workplace and how you should be, you know, not have to face an uncomfortable moment or, you know, people shouldn't touch you or unwanted leave. Suddenly, they were okay with this. It just seemed to show, to me, broken morals. Like, you really have no principles."

"What do we make of what's going on with violence and the word violence? Because it's a common word among the woke. They seem to have broadened the definition, silence is violence and words can be violence, but then actual violence? Not a big deal. It's like, 'Violence is not an answer, except when I f***ing feel like it, and then it's a great answer.'"

"How we teach our kids history has become a big controversy these days, with liberals accusing conservatives of wanting to whitewash the past, and sometimes that’s true, sometimes they do. But plenty of liberals also want to abuse history to control the present, and last month, a scholar named James Sweet caught hell for calling them out for doing just that. He criticized the phenomenon known as ‘ presentism,’ which means judging everyone in the past by the standards of the present. It’s the belief that people who lived 100 or 500 or 1,000 years ago really should have known better, which is so stupid. It’s like getting mad at yourself for not knowing what you know now when you were ten."

"Who doesn't have moments from your past that make you cringe? ... You ate dirt, you wanted to be a Ghostbuster, you shoplifted gum, you tried to be a white breakdancer, you wanted to marry Scott Baio. I read Ayn Rand. I smoked, I was into numerology. You had to grow into the person you would become. Humanity writ large is just a collective version of that."

"Did Columbus commit atrocities? Of course. But people back then were generally atrocious. Everybody who could afford one had a slave, including people of color. The way people talk about slavery these days, you’d think it was a uniquely American thing that we invented in 1619. But slavery throughout history has been the rule, not the exception: the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the British, the early Americans, all the way up through R. Kelly."

"The Holy Bible is practically an owner’s manual for slaveholders. The word ‘slave’ comes from Slav, because so many Slavic people were enslaved, and they’re as white as the Hallmark Channel. Who do you think gathered the slaves from the interior of Africa to sell to slave traders? Africans, who also kept their own slaves. We’re a species prone to making others of our species our bitch. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Humans are not good people, and the capacity for cruelty is a human thing, not a white thing. That’s the truth, even though it doesn’t jive with the current narrative."

"But in today’s world, when truth conflicts with narrative, it’s the truth that has to apologize. Being woke is like a magic moral time machine, where you judge everybody against what you imagine you would have done in 1066, and you always win."

"Portland Public Schools has a plan now to teach kids that the idea of gender being mainly binary was brought here by white colonizers. The curriculum guide says, ‘When the United States was colonized by white settlers, their views around gender were forced upon the people already living here.’ Not even Star Trek would try that story, where they discover a planet and give them separate bathrooms."

"It’s like they finally discovered a unified theory of wokeness, incorporating all their ideas about race, gay, gender, and colonizers. Like the New World was a great big diverse dance club and the pilgrims were the bridge and tunnel crows who ruined everything."

"If you are part of today’s woke revolution, you need to study the part of revolutions where they spin out of control because the revolutionaries get so drunk on their own purifying elixir, they imagine they can reinvent the very nature of human beings."

"Communists thought selfishness, selfishness, could be cast out of human nature. Russian revolutionists spoke of the new Soviet Man who wasn’t motivated by self-interest but instead wanted to be part of the collective. No, it turns out he wanted to be on a yacht in a Gucci tracksuit, holding a vodka and a prostitute. Not standing all day in line for a potato."

"The problem with communism and with some very recent ideologies here at home is that they think you can change reality by screaming at it, that you can bend human nature by holding your breath. But that’s the difference between reality and your mommy. Lincoln once said that you can repeal all past history, but you still cannot repeal human nature. But he’s canceled now, so f*** him."

"Work in the fields? Senator, I'm a house nigga."

"The banjo player from Mumford and Sons tweeted that he liked a book. A book that apparently had not been approved by the revolution. So, of course, he had to delete the tweet, then take time away from the band. Oh my God! You mean this could have affected Mumford and Sons? And then the cringing apology, ‘I have come to better understand the pain caused by the book I endorsed.’ Pain? From a book? Unless he hit the drummer over the head with it. Whatever happened to, ‘I can read whatever the f*** I want?"

"Good intentions can turn into the insane arrogance of thinking your revolution is so fucking awesome and your generation is so mind-bendingly improved that you have bequeathed the world with a new kind of human, you're welcome."

"With communists, that human was no longer selfish. In America today, that human is no longer born male or female. And obesity is not something that affects health. You can be healthy at any size. Really, we voted on it. A formerly serious magazine (The Atlantic) last year published with a straight face an article called 'Separating Sports By Sex Doesn't Make Sense.' Yes, it does. Because, again, we haven't reinvented homo sapiens since Crystal Pepsi came out."

"I've spent 3 decades on T.V. mocking Republicans who said climate change was just a theory and now I have to deal with people who say you know what else is just a theory, biology?"

"That's where it all went wrong for us. It's again the same principle as I was saying before about like the reverse of what liberalism really is. Liberalism is for the sake of humanity and compassion; can we get these people off the streets? And woke is, ‘How dare you ask them to move! This is their home...’ No, it's not!"

"And of course, they didn't like it. And it's just a good example of could everybody just stop the posturing? Don't pretend that you love migrants so much and then when we send them to you, you don't like them. You know, you're full of s--- and we can see that. Yeah, you liked them when it wasn't your problem because you're not a border state. And then when they show up in Chicago, in New York, you're like, What the f---? What are we going to do with these people?"

"You’re like liberals back when they were more reasonable before they became leftists. And now every liberal kind of has to be a leftist. If you want to be on the team, you’ve got to subscribe to the most fringe ideas that the team is promoting. You can be woke, with all the nonsense that that now implies, but don’t say that somehow it’s an extension of liberalism. Because it’s most often actually an undoing of liberalism. You can have your points of view and your positions on these things but don’t try and piggyback on what I always believe. I have always believed, as liberals do for example, in a colorblind society."

"The goal is to not see race at all, anywhere for any reason. That’s what liberals always believed all the way through Obama, going back [to] Kennedy, everybody, Martin Luther King. That’s not what the woke believe. They believe race is first and foremost the thing you should always see everywhere, which I find interesting because that used to be the position of the Ku Klux Klan. Again, you can have that position, but don’t say that’s a liberal position. You’re doing something very different."

"As an Ivy League graduate who knows the value of a liberal education, I have one piece of advice for the youth of America: Don’t go to college. And if you absolutely have to go, don’t go to an elite college, because as recent events have shown, it just makes you stupid."

"There are few if any positives to come out of what happened in Israel. But one is opening America’s eyes to how higher education has become indoctrination into a stew of bad ideals, among them the simplistic notion that the world is a binary place where everyone is either an oppressor or oppressed, in the case of Israel, oppressors being babies and bubbles."

"The same students who will tell you that words are violence and silence is violence, were very supportive when Hamas terrorists went on a rape and murder rampage worthy of the Vikings. They knew where to point the finger, at the murdered, and then it was off to ethics class."

"They don’t know much of anything actually, but it doesn’t deter them from having an opinion. They’ve convinced themselves Israel is the most repressive regime in history because they have no knowledge of history or even a desire to know it. And actually, history doesn’t come up in their intersectionality of politics and genderqueer identities class."

"College life today is a day’s spa combined with a North Korean reeducation camp. It’s a daycare center with a meal plan, except the toddlers can fire the adults. The fact that college presidents, who usually love to speak out about anything, couldn’t find their voice to condemn the worst attack since the Holocaust. There is a lot about who really controls colleges and why its ignorance is a disease. Harvard Yard is the Wuhan wet market."

"But the reason why despising Israel became pretty much a requirement of the American left is colleges, elite colleges. The mouth of the river from which this and all manners of radical left illiberal, yes illiberal, nonsense flows. Supporting all-black, that is segregated dorms, segregated graduation ceremonies, and orientation programs, which occur on hundreds of colleges, is illiberal, so is the racism against Asian applicants. And chasing speakers off of campus… there is only one set of acceptable opinions on campus and it is policed hard."

"But there is a deep state, which is the bureaucratic class that justifies its existence by making up new rules and that’s my job. It’s the vast network of regulators, administrators, inspectors, contractor reviewers, project managers, fee accessors, special commissioners, zoning officers, and consultants, whose jobs seem to be to make sure that nothing ever happens and then charge you for it. The people who answer the phone, Permit office. ‘How may I hinder you.’"

"Last year, Wyoming began construction on the largest wind farm in North America that will power 2 million homes in Arizona, Nevada, and California. And to think, it only took 18 years—not to build it, to approve it. Eighteen backlogged, knuckle-dragging, pencil-pushing thumb-twaddling, ball-scratching years to finally get to ‘yes.’ When they started doing the paperwork, Leonardo DiCaprio's girlfriend wasn't even born."

"How ironic, with all the talk about the urgency to switching to green energy, our deep state of petty tyrants wasted almost two decades over permitting and nitpicking over the environmental impacts and social effects of the very thing that would most positively impact the environment."

"Semafor estimates that if the red tape could be cut on everything that is currently stuck in the renewable queue, the United States would be 80% zero carbon in 7 years. The enemy of clean air isn't just Big Oil, it's Big Permitting. It's not that America isn't able to get anything done, it's that we're not allowed to. Of course, there should be consideration of the environment on everything we build but as so often happens on the left they seem to have no ability to recognize when they've taken a concept way too far and are in fact hurting their own cause."