Lewis Black Quotes

Socialism appeals to me. It's like imposed Christianity. You've got to share.

I think one reason people play golf is it allows them to obsess about something other than the daily crap. It takes your mind off that.

If you want to get an audience quiet, just say "abortion" and everybody shuts up and the tension in the room is spectacular.

If a group of people - leaders - can convince a group of folk who barely have a pot to piss in that the rich shouldn't be taxed
THAT is leadership!

This is how sad my life is: I got a scar from scratching my chicken pox too much. That's my big scar story. I really have no major scars.

If you're seeing a psychiatrist, you're wasting money because all you've got to do is get on a plane, get on a subway tomorrow and, inevitably, you're going to be seated in front of some guy who's playing with himself, and he'll be singing, 'Happy Days Are Here Again.' I tell you - when I see that guy, I feel pretty good about myself.

Republicans and Democrats can barely do what they're supposed to do, and they sure can't do math!

Democrats are dumb and Republicans are stupid, but the difference between dumb and stupid is dumb isn't funny. Dumb is when you say something and the whole room goes, 'What did he say?'

I love anything that gets me outside of my own head.

I do the same gig. I might change it a little; I might slow it down if I'm in the South. I talk fast, and they're not used to people talking that fast.

You don't want another Enron? Here's your law: If a company, can't explain, in one sentence, what it does ... it's illegal.

I do have certain feelings. My feeling is that whoever is in charge, I want him out.

How our government works ... it doesn't.

I believe that every paper in the country should have one headline that when you read it, you laugh so hard you can't stand it. It has to be that way. What about a headline like this: 'Hippo Eats Dwarf'? How good is that? You read that headline, and you immediately close the paper and say, 'Wow, it's gonna be a great day.

A republican stands up in congress and says 'I GOT A REALLY BAD IDEA!!' and the democrat stands up after him and says 'AND I CAN MAKE IT SHITTIER!!

You got to be just stupid to not be focused on alternative energy.

Kids seem to get me when I play colleges - they like it because I go after them. They'll come up after and say I am like their dads, only funny.

If I get a week off, I'll go to a hotel that has a golf course. I like to come downstairs and go right onto the course. I'll do that five days in a row.

The fear of health care changing is beyond belief. Like there's a way to make the system worse. Really?

If you're going to pick a book and you want to base a system of government around it, why not 'Harry Potter?'

If you're going to vote for somebody because you think they have a great faith in God, you'd better be sure that God has faith in them.

I feel the need to scream, and even if the scream is not answered, I find my sanity in the echo.

Writing is thinking and thinking is hard work.

All you had to say was, 'I am a writer,' and you became one. You didn't even have to write anything. You could just sit in a coffee shop with a notebook and stare into space, with a slightly bemused look on your face, judging the weight of the world with a jaundiced eye. As you can see, you can be completely full of shit and still be a writer ... I also thought it was going to be a great way to meet girls, but it wasn't
probably because as I was staring into space, I no doubt looked mildly retarded. You see, I wanted to write plays, which in retrospect is a lot harder than learning Mandarin, I think. How I ended up in this delusional state shall be saved for another time.

I've got stuff about airline mergers, which just shows that my stand-up is getting more insane by the minute.

North Korea is the country that the monkeys in the Wizard of Oz came from.

Wow, you survived a blackout. You're made of stronger stuff than ice cream.

There should be a law that you can't shut down the government - that you don't have that power.

I am Batman. That's who I am, who are you?

I'd like the campaigning to be about all the things they're not going to do. Just tell me what you're not going do! Don't tell me what you're going to do. Just say "I'd really like to do solar energy but I'm not going to be able to. I really want to dig holes everywhere in the country but I really won't be able to do it because people seem to think that maybe my water will be screwed up."

I had more material on weather than anyone else, I guess, ... back when I was traveling a lot on the road as a standup comic, between airport security and the weather ... I just wanted to be prepared for sitting in the airport.

The Democrats have responded to the Republicans' lack of dealing with reality by truly not dealing with reality, either.

At seven p.m., hope is sparked again when some new chirpy airline employee announces that a new plane without that nasty mechanical problem - the aviation of the clap - will arrive around 9 o'clock. Apparently, the old plane would now be used as a decoy plane so that when a plane wasn't available it could be loaded with passengers who could sit there thinking that they would be leaving in fifteen minutes.

Basically, I started on stage yelling and I kept yelling, and then I yelled some more, and then I yelled even louder. I'm modulated now.

Most of the longer-term relationships I've known have been gay relationships. They seem to be able to hang out longer.

I like my friends because they make me feel normal, even though I'm not.

That's the funny thing about religion: it doesn't matter what you say, you're going to upset someone.

None of this seems to affect the leadership, that people don't go out to vote, that they don't feel the need to go vote, that they already feel disenfranchised. It's not just Obama's fault or Clinton's or whomever's, it's all of them, the whole collection of clowns I've had to sit through.

It's absolutely stupid that we live without an ozone layer. We have men, we've got rockets, we've got saran wrap - fix it!

Usually I'm too tired to apologize.

Whenever someone says they believe the earth was created in 7 days, I grab a fossil and say, Fossil. And if they keep talking, I throw it just over their heads.

Earth Day was created because we were doing a lot of drugs, more drugs than you could ever f@*! imagine. And so we came up with Earth Day, so we'd have one day that would remind us what planet we were living on.

I've always been a social network retard, even before there was a social network. People would say, "You want to go to this party and do some networking?"

I had an iPhone and a Droid and both of them were miserable pieces of equipment.

Apparently there is no profit in the unique, or not enough to make it worthwhile to preserve. Ultimately it drains the life out of us, and existentialism starts to make more and more sense.

For a while, I thought the great disappointment of my life was that I don't have a family of my own. Then it dawned on me: That's not what I think; that's what married people think.

Stand-up is the only thing in which you actually write it, act it and direct it simultaneously, so it's actually a great theater exercise.

Johnny Vassilaros is the man who has created the finest cup of coffee ever served in the city of New York.

This is the thing I've never understood: If someone is going to hell for being gay or being a Jew or a Muslim or having an abortion, then what are you worried about? You don't need to try and convert these people or try and save them. If you really believe in your religion, these people are already doomed, so stop worrying about them.

They've gotta stop reporting wind chill. That's nonsense. It really is. I don't know where they came up with it, why they came up with it, but it's a lie. They come on, "Well, it's 27 degrees today, but with the wind chill, it's minus 3." ... Well, then it's minus 3, asshole! I don't need to know what the weather was like if the conditions were perfect!

You can never put too much pork in your mouth as far as I'm concerned.

Then there was the man who declared in court, he wasn't a person. "Excuse me, sir, why haven't you paid your taxes." "Well, as you can clearly see, I am not a person." "Well, you look like a person." "No it's all done with mirrors, trust me!"

I've been very lucky. There are guys I know who are really terrific in this business of stand-up who have not gotten the recognition they deserve. And it's nice, if you've put in the time, to achieve that recognition.

Basically I wake up in the morning and I think everything's going to be great. I'm really kind of optimistic, and I look forward to a new day. I pick up 'The New York Times,' and I look at the front page and realize that once again I'm wrong. I start to fixate on stuff.

Behind me, I heard a young woman of 25 say, "If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college." Now, I'm gonna repeat that, because it bears repeating. "If it weren't for my horse ... " as in, giddyup, giddyup, let's go - "I wouldn't have spent that year in college," which is a degree-granting institution. Don't think about that too long, or BLOOD will shoot out your NOSE!

I went to New Zealand this year, and, whew man, I know a lot of people want to go there. But let me just tell you, it's 22 hours by plane. So, if you have the opportunity, don't.

I never write anything down. I write onstage.

These ballot initiatives remind us that America is the land where people are free to dream whatever they want, so long as that dream doesn't make Midwesterners feel icky!

The Republicans are the party of bad ideas. The Democrats are the party of no ideas.

I've always really liked theater. It fascinated me. You can create a reality and get people involved in that reality. It takes place in real time.

Stupidity really gets me going, when it's just plain stupid, obvious stupidity.

Nyquil comes in two colors, red and green, and it's the only thing on the planet that tastes like red and green.

I do not make jokes about Sarah Palin simply because I could not live in this world if I believed she was a real person.

What I find most disturbing about Valentine's Day is, look, I get that you have to have a holiday of love, but in the height of flu season, it makes no sense.

The whole Valentine's thing is fine, but you don't back it up right next to the biggest gift-giving holiday of the year. Unbelievable. And we find it acceptable.

No matter what, your parents are going to worry about you. I had a tour bus, and my mother still thought I was broke. Remember: It's your life, not theirs. Just because your parents sent you to college doesn't mean they bought the rest of your life.

Democrats are like a big tortoise that's on its back and can't get up; you can't make jokes about that.

Macs are not intuitive. It's intuitive to the person who created it. It's not intuitive to me.

We don't have seasons anymore. You know why? We lost the ozone layer. Well, put it on milk cartons - let's find it!

Here's why I think there's something a little odd with George Bush. Because a lot of the times when he speaks, his words don't match his face. Something is askew. You can't talk about the war with a smile on your face. He does it constantly. If you're the President, you should go We're going to talk about the war, I must have a frowny face. The only time you can smile when you're talking about the war in Iraq is when you go, Well, two Iraqis walk into a bar, hahaha.

In New York, f*** isn't even a word. It's a comma.

The thing that makes my generation The Greatest is our ability to hang out. We're spectacular at it. If you take somebody from my generation and sit them on a couch and bring them food and plumbing, they'll sit there and talk to you about anything you want until the day you die.

See ... What I felt they should have done, for our first public works project, is build a giant wall ... across the entire border of Canada. Because that's where the cold air comes from.

Well first of all, I'd just like to say that 2005 was a great year, if you like swimming through crap.

There's no such thing as soy milk. It's soy juice.

I'm not a great joke writer, which is odd for a comic to say, but I'm not.

If we're not going to tax the rich anymore, we're going to create class warfare.

A father and two sons run Adelphia. It's a cable company. And they took from that company a billion dollars. A billion. Three people - three people took a billion dollars. What were they gonna do, start their own space program? 'Let's send the monkey to Mars, Dad!'

You know what would help the instruction form? Verbs! Verbs would be nice! Because they help you get to the end of a thought!

Christians have created a holiday that has become a beast that cannot be fed. Christmas gets longer and longer and longer, and you don't care, do you? You just take more and more of the calendar for yourself. It's unbelievable. How long does it take you people to shop? It's beyond belief. It's insane. When I was a kid, Halloween was Halloween, and Santa wasn't poking his ass into it.

It's 2003. Why can't I teleport?

Let me be serious: divorce is a sacred institution between a man and a woman who hate each other. God wanted Adam to pay alimony to Eve, not Steve.

The thing is, whenever I see Hillary Clinton, I feel like I have to vote for her. She makes me feel guilty because I feel like I should vote for her so that she'll feel better about herself because she'd been in such a bad marriage.

Since there are so many idiots out there, you may actually start to think you're crazy. You are not. They are idiots.

It's a shame cars don't run on cognitive dissonance.

I don't Tweet a lot because I've Tweeted things that I thought were really innocuous about subjects that are inflammatory, and the response is so insane sometimes from people.

Saying that the Palestinian people aren't really a people - that's not a zany thing to say. That's a psychotic thing to say in the midst of all of the politics we live through on a daily basis.

Every other civilized country has determined when life begins and it's something that eludes us. We've got things that have to be done! "We didn't fix that bridge because you are all down at the meeting house discussing abortion again."

What I've found in my career is that 70 to 75 percent of comics are nice and have some sense of social skills, but there are those who end up in comedy because they don't know how to socialize. I don't want to deal with that group.

What you don't do, if you're an adult, is decide that you're going to budget things through a sequester. What does that word have to do with budgeting? It's like if you have a family budget and go, 'We really don't know what to take out economically from the budget, so we're going to whack out protein for this week.'

I would like to play Pebble Beach at some point. I keep waiting for them to call and ask me to that little pro-am thing, but I'm not big enough.

Americans continue to rapidly homogenize ourselves into a neutered oblivion. For a country founded on the protection of the unique, we relish our sameness.

Political audiences are not fun.

If you are an adult, and you are planning to dress up on Halloween ... don't. I will find you. I will hurt you.

All food is comfort food. Maybe I just like to chew.

I have N'Sync and Aerosmith and Britney Spears. I have a trifecta from hell.

When I was a kid, you ate, and you drank, and you passed out and nobody woke you up and said, 'Let's go shopping.

Everybody's always asking me about my blood pressure. They did an interview once where they hooked me up to a blood pressure machine and they'd rile me. I'd yell and scream, and then it would just go back to normal in a few minutes. Everything else is probably rotting, but the blood pressure is spectacular.

There is no better moment than this moment, when we're anticipating the actual moment itself. All of the moments that lead up to the actual moment are truly the best moments. Those are the moments that are filled with good times. Those are the moments in which you are able to think that it is going to be perfect, when the moment actually happens. But, the moment is reality, and reality always kinda sucks!

The people we elect aren't bipartisan. The American public is bipartisan.