John Oliver quotes:

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  • Anybody who claims to be excited for April Fools' Day is probably a sociopath.

  • My first 'Daily Show' piece was pretending I had this terrible immigrant journey, so I went to talk to an immigration lawyer who would help out people, and I ran into him in Penn Station about three months after I'd gotten the green card. I said, 'I got my green card yesterday.' And he hugged me because he understood that level of relief.

  • The British media is sinking down, as the American news media has lowered the bar for all of humanity. British news media is definitely trying to stoop down to that level. Everyone is stooping to the lowest common denominator.

  • Australia turns out to be a sensational place, albeit one of the most comfortably racist places I've ever been in. They've really settled into their intolerance like an old resentful slipper.

  • The Confederate flag is one of those things that should only be seen on t-shirts, belt buckles and bumper stickers to help the rest of us identify the worst people in the world.

  • I get nostalgic for British negativity. There is an inherent hope and positive drive to New Yorkers. When you go back to Britain, everybody is just running everything down. It's like whatever the opposite of a hug is.

  • I've said yes to everything that Jon Stewart has asked me to do. That's been a pretty good career decision, I think.

  • Veterans' issues are quite close to my heart. I find it quite hard to talk about, actually.

  • Being a Mets fan is like lending someone a lot of money and you just know that you'll never get paid back.

  • There is an inherent hope and positive drive to New Yorkers.

  • Campaign ads are the backbone of American democracy if American democracy suffered a gigantic spinal injury.

  • People in Britain see Richard Quest as a kind of an offensive cartoon character.

  • There are some people who watch NASCAR for the highly skilled driving - but most people watch it for the crashes.

  • Southern people are bigger-hearted and kinder than I had any right to expect.

  • I feel more at home knowing I'm not really at home. It takes all the pressure off you trying to fit in!

  • I really love stand-up. I'm more than happy to do it for nothing. I've come to America to do it for nothing. It's the American Dream: Work for free.

  • We in Britain stopped evolving gastronomically with the advent of the pie. Everything beyond that seemed like a brave, frightening new world. We knew the French were up to something across the Channel, but we didn't want anything to do with it.

  • The only thing I'm nervous about is talking to guests like human beings, because all of my interviews so far have been attacking people. I have a genuine concern about sitting across from an actor whose movies I obviously haven't seen.

  • When you've married someone who's been at war, there is nothing you can do that compares to that level of selflessness and bravery.

  • 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.

  • The British press are a group of unremitting scumbags. And sometimes they use that scumbaggery to good ends, and often not.

  • If you work on a comedy show, your basic form of communication is teasing. That's generally how we speak to each other: you communicate the information between the lines of insulting sentences.

  • I would much rather America was a more stable, wonderful place. You know, I love it.

  • In improv, the whole thing is that it is a relationship between the two people, as a back and forth. In standup, you don't really want to be listening to what somebody is saying; you want to project your jokes into their face. And that's really not a good instinct with a 'Daily Show' field piece, where it's supposed to be an interview.

  • There are so many low points with stand-up. You are perpetually humiliated, so it doesn't really matter anymore. I don't have any dignity left to lose. An audience can't hurt you anymore when you've been completely dismantled.

  • I find it hard in my general life to think further than the week ahead.

  • I wanted to be a soccer player. I knew that couldn't happen.

  • I watch one news channel until my soul can't take it anymore. It's the background of my life.

  • You just try to be true to your idea of what is funny and what is also interesting.

  • When you're dealing with serious subjects, there is a pressure to be absolutely sure that you know what you're doing.

  • I'm not really much of an actor, so when I started on 'The Daily Show', I was just trying to adopt the faux authority of a newsperson.

  • Welcome to The Daily Show, I'm John Oliver. Jon Stewart is still not here. He is currently living out a live-action Lord of the Rings role-playing experience deep in the New Zealand wilderness.

  • Ads are baked into content like chocolate chips into a cookie. Except, it's actually more like raisins into a cookie because no one [expletive] wants them there.

  • There are two kinds of hecklers: the destructive and constructive hecklers.

  • 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.

  • I think Americans still can't help but respond to the natural authority of this voice. Deep down they long to be told what to do by a British accent. That's why so many infomercials have British people.

  • I think the best analogy for where we are right now is that America is Elvis Presley -- the most beautiful, talented, rebellious nation in the history of Earth. And now, you're in your Vegas years. You've squeezed yourself into a white jumpsuit, you're wheezing your way through 'Love Me Tender' and you might be about to pass away bloated on the toilet. But you're still the King.

  • Mr. President, no one is saying you broke any laws, we're just saying it's a little bit weird you didn't have to.

  • Pumpkin spice lattes are egg nog for morning people.

  • Iran is the middle child of the Axis of Evil. Iraq is the oldest child and gets the lion's share of the attention, and North Korea is the crazy baby.

  • Net neutrality: The only two words that promise more boredom in the English language are 'featuring Sting,'

  • It's a great time to be doing political satire when the world is on a knife edge.

  • The moment I accept that there's an artistic, redeeming quality in puns, I have a horrible feeling I'll get hooked.

  • I'm British, so obviously I repress any powerful emotions of any kind in relation to anything.

  • A Southern accent is not a club in my bag.

  • There's never any time I think I'm a real journalist, because I don't have any of the qualifications or the intentions for that.

  • I can't relax. I find vacations problematic.

  • Sarah Palin has been hired back by Fox News, and she only left five months ago. She has now effectively quit quitting. She can't even commit to being uncommitted.

  • It's pretty physically unsettling, living life on a visa.

  • If you're asking me, would I have voted for Mitt Romney, the answer is absolutely not. Emphatically not. I cannot envision a world in which I would have voted for Mitt Romney unless I sustained a massive concussion.

  • I do one accent - my own. I can make it louder or quieter. That is the sum total of my vocal range. I thought I could do an American accent until I tried it in front of an American - the expression of horror is still burnt onto my retinas.

  • There is no greater anesthetic than sport.

  • Attending a Sarah Palin rally was simultaneously one of the strangest and most chilling events of my life.

  • My family is from Liverpool, so I have some of those vowel sounds, I've got the slack tone of someone from Birmingham, and then I was raised in Bedford, which is just north of London. So my accent, if it's possible, makes even less sense to a Brit than to an American.

  • My family are from Liverpool, so I have some twang there - I have a Midlands accent, and I was raised about an hour north of London, so my voice is a mess. Although, to American ears, it sounds like the crisp language of a queen's butler.

  • I did sketch comedy, but I never did improv. So I've just tried to learn as I go.

  • Most stand-ups, once they have done it, think of it as their default job. I'm pretty sure Jon Stewart still feels that way now. You are a stand-up first; other things come and go.

  • If I wanted to take a more activist or journalistic slant in work, I should probably just go be an activist or a journalist. But I'm happy being a comedian.

  • I think puns are not just the lowest form of wit, but the lowest form of human behavior.

  • I feel non-stop Brit shame!

  • Stand-up comedy seems like a terrifying thing. Objectively. Before anyone has done it, it seems like one of the most frightening things you could conceive, and there's just no shortcut - you just have to do it.

  • Congress never loses its capacity to disappoint you.

  • I'm not really much of an actor, so when I started on 'The Daily Show,' I was just trying to adopt the faux authority of a newsperson. Having a British accent definitely gave me a sonic leg up on that because there is a faux authority to the British accent in and of itself.

  • I realize how desperate it sounds for me, as a comedian, to ask you to laugh at my jokes.

  • As any Brit will understand, things get a little easier when you don't have to be number one any more. Really, the fall of an empire is not as bad as everyone thinks. It's like retirement. People fear retirement, but it can turn out be rather pleasant.

  • News is not a game show. You don't win a car if you happen to be right.

  • Economics is like the Dutch language - I'm told it makes sense, but I have my doubts.

  • Democracy is like a tambourine, not everyone can be trusted with it.

  • Believe it or not the war on Iraq is based on a sound scientific principle, The bee hive principle. Which clearly states that if you are stung by a bee, you should follow it back to its nest and then proceed to beat nest to a pulp with a baseball bat until the stripey little turd has learned its lesson.

  • According to current Florida law you can get a gun, follow an unarmed minor, call the police, have them explicitly tell you to stop following [the minor] and choose to ignore that, keep following the minor, get into a confrontation with them, and if at any point during that process you get scared you can shoot the minor to death, and the state of Florida will say, 'Well, look: you did what you could.'

  • Once you learn how to make people laugh, then you get to choose exactly how you want to make them laugh.

  • One thing that America is objectively exceptional at is overreacting whenever anyone accuses them of not being exceptional.

  • Politics has become infused with narcissism in America.

  • People are always going to say stupid things, and you're always going to be able to make jokes about that, but it should be the last thing you add in, because it's the easiest thing.

  • When you see people say crazy things on our show, they mean this stuff,and that's easy to forget: They're not joking.

  • You don't really know when stand-up material is TV ready; it's just at what point you're willing to let it go and not work on it anymore. I'm not sure there is a point at which you think: 'And that is finished.'

  • Sometimes it's good to remember how bad food can be, so you can enjoy the concept of flavour to the fullest.

  • I'm always interested in audience interaction. Not so much aggressive audience interaction - I'm genuinely interested in how people see things.

  • In improv, the whole thing is that it is a relationship between the two people, as a back and forth. In standup, you don't really want to be listening to what somebody is saying; you want to project your jokes into their face.

  • I have exactly as much rhythm as you think I have.

  • The poverty line is like the age of consent: if you find yourself parsing exactly where it is, you've probably already done something very, very wrong.

  • We invented words; we'll tell you how they're supposed to sound.

  • You don't need people's opinion on a fact.

  • I think I'm just a summer fling that people will soon forget.

  • Having a human conversation is not something I've had any training in either as a comedian or as, you know, a human being.

  • If you've been here, in New York, it has been dominated by the UN General Assembly, the annual event where delegates come from all over the world to f*** up this city's traffic.

  • It's exciting to have a role in anything that's Claymation, just because you're always intrigued by what a clay wizard version of yourself would be.

  • The disconnect between America and its military is shocking.

  • As a general rule, no one should ever be allowed to say there is no history of racial tension here, because that sentence has never been true anywhere on Earth,

  • I would hate to meet myself at 15.

  • People, I guess, generally come to see me do stand-up with a working knowledge of my broad sense of humor on The Daily Show ... I don't think anyone would mistake me as an actual anchor.

  • Stand-up, for me, is really more of an addiction, so you have to feed the beast whenever you can.

  • Every empire has to get sucked down the drain. As a British person, I know how it feels.

  • I don't know if there is some psychological thing of wanting to know where your doctor got his degree from before he comes into the medical room.

  • I know I'd be an absolutely horrendous politician.

  • When you're doing stand-up, you want to stand onstage and, to the extent that you can, uncomplicatedly entertain.

  • I think being an outsider in general always helps you in comedy. I think it helps to have an outsider's eye. And so I have an outsider's voice. You know, as soon as I start talking, I don't belong here. And I think that helps in a way.

  • You're sonically racist, Americans. You think we all sound the same, whereas I have definitely a mongrel accent.

  • If you vote for Democrats, you might as well give Al Quaeda a death ray and a manual.

  • I'm British; pessimism is my wheelhouse.

  • Here in America, people come out to see what they've known you to do. In England, it's like everyone comes out to tell you exactly how well they think you're doing.

  • You can write jokes at any point of the day. Jokes are not that hard to write, or they shouldn't be when it is literally your job.

  • If you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring.

  • You know that things are not going well when you lose the moral high ground to a TMZ reporter,

  • When I heard that Hitler had problems with flatulence, it's funny. What - does that make him a funny man? No. It means he had funny moments when his rear end was speaking louder than his mouth.

  • By any rational metric, I am boring.

  • Everybody should care about facts. That is something all of us should agree on.

  • Teenagers falling off skateboards - funny. Nut shots - funny. Breaking wind - funny. The world cannot change those. Those three things are columns upon which humor is built.

  • I care about facts the way I care about oxygen and imbibing enough water a day to live.

  • I was definitely prepared for it to be slower, and it has not worked out that way in any shape or form. I'm grateful as a comedian, and slightly demoralized, occasionally, as a human being - those two things are always very different.

  • I guess the tone of jokes is often, at best, irreverent, but it always comes from a place of deep love.

  • I don't think I'm identified as the anchorman, I think I'm identified as the impostor anchorman - there's a very clear line there ... I don't think it changes the way they respond.

  • I have a green card now, but they can take that away, yeah, they can take that away at any moment. So please don't; please let me keep it.

  • I do not want to leave in [U.S.] ... I cannot make that clear enough to immigration authorities who may be listening to this interview. I don't want to leave, so please don't make me.

  • Florida, just because you're shaped like some combination of a gun and a d*ck doesn't mean you have to act that way.

  • Do you know how hard it is to kill 30 million people? It's a logistical nightmare.

  • I think it might honestly be time for the Sunshine State to officially change its motto to the Worst State.

  • People are friendlier in New York than London.

  • British people would die for their right to drink themselves to death

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