Bill Maher
“I believed in Santa Claus and the Fairy Godmother, of course I believed in a virgin birth, and a guy lived in a whale, and a woman came from a rib. But then something happened that made me doubt all of it: I graduated sixth grade!”
“Religion, it stops people from thinking because they think all the answers are in that one book; it impedes progress; it justifies crazy people. Flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative.”
“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.”
“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... That's like Sweden coming tenth in Swedish meatballs.”
“That's America for you -- a red herring culture, always scared of the wrong things. The fact is, there are a lot of creepy middle-aged men out there lusting for your kids. They work for MTV, the pharmaceutical industry, McDonald's, Marlboro and K Street.”
“We were asked to do very little, and we responded. That's the bargain we tacitly make with our presidents: we won't ask too much of you, if you don't ask too much of us.”
“We have a Bill of Rights. What we need is a Bill of Responsibilities.”
“We're a complacent society, hard to get riled up in the first place, and then when we do, it's misdirected.”
“I'll show you Obama's birth certificate when you show me Sarah Palin's high school diploma.”
“It's not that we don't care--it's just that that we'd prefer not to get involved.”
“I'm out of the mainstream. I enjoy it, who wants to be in the mainstream?”
“I don't respect thinking that is dangerous, prejudicial, childish, and could get me killed.”
“I find that the world is changing much, much faster than I can even bitch about it.”
“Not doing anything is doing something and choosing to look away is a passive but no less mortal sin.”
“I hate stupidity, but what I hate even more is when people actually brag about it.”
“To a coward, courage always looks like stupidity.”
“Every day in America is a day with a shooting.”
“Women are also property in our bible; adultery is a property crime in the Old Testament, not a sex crime.”
“The point is, a leader does what he thinks is right, not what he thinks the popular thing is.”
“But females in even the most advanced Muslim countries are simply, by law, not the equal of men.”
“Lies are ubiquitous. And in that way they are quite analogous to germs and viruses. People think that you can germ-proof the world and never have to be in contact with the things that can hurt you; but you can't. You have to have a strong immune system. It's the reason babies who live in sterile environments are more likely to develop allergies than babies who are allowed to exist in the world as it is: messy and impure. Lies are all around you. Develop a better bullshit detector. That's a better solution than me giving up what I'm allowed to read. Who decides that? Who decides what gets the "No evidence for that" sticker slapped on it. Most people in this country still have a religion. They believe they have an imaginary best friend in the sky who they can talk to to help them with their problems. Nobody throws up a warning label on that that says there's no evidence for this.”
